“I am rooted, but I flow,” writes Virginia Woolf in her quietly luminous novel The Waves—a line that shimmers with paradox: to remain anchored without becoming static, to yield without dissolving. In Woolf’s prose, Jinny—the novel’s most embodied voice—does not merely dance; she is dance. She moves through the world like water through fingers: elusive, sensual, impossible to pin down. Her identity is not a fixed point but a rhythm. Not a noun, but a verb. Not a definition, but a state.
A century later, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi would give this state a name: Flow. Complete absorption in the moment, where time softens, ego recedes, and the doing becomes the being. He found it in surgeons and chess players, in climbers and coders, and—perhaps most intuitively—in dancers.
