Patterns of fluidity in Humanity

PART OF UNPSYCHOLOGY’S WARM DATA ANTHOLOGY SERIES

BY MAINUNAH MOSLI

You can find a version of this article in Unpsychology #8: an anthology of warm data. Download the full magazine FREE from www.unpsychology.org

This piece is my way of combining multiple contexts that exist for most of us. Water in its abundance and normative ways offers a flow that is seem‐ ingly usual for many but it too showed us the “energy” and “trust” to move outside its usual landmark and functionalities. Yet its not the same. Water is contextualised. I have never paid attention to the existence of water in our body before I wrote this.

Writing this further helps me with relevance, resonance and reliance. As a family therapist, looking at water and re-mem‐ bering its function and fluidity prepares me to develop an observer’s perspec‐ tive that often reminds me of the need to equally observe the stuckness and fluidity that exists in families and the larger context they are in. Therapist observation and being with families is crucial as the water that flows through trenches, drains and rivers.

The movement of “withness” like water, questions who is the the expert. Water never claims mighty but the gush and energy flow is its relationship to volume, mass and ‘edges’ it existed in. Containment of the pain, the stuckness, failures, disappointment, hopes and beauty of a family interaction is almost the same as how earth held on to water that exists in many platforms, the ocean, the sea, the rivers and the falls. Like life, they all offer a flow.