The coffee shops here (Seattle's Ballard / Green Lake neighborhoods) all play indie rock that sounds like R.E.M. from the Reckoning or Life's Rich Paegant era. Or maybe it’s just me. I’ve only been here ten days, sleeping on my buddy Kevin’s floor, and haven’t really figured out anything yet. Transitions are always tricky, whether you’re building a ramp, getting into or out of a relationship, or relocating.

And it can get to you. Especially if you’ve just come from the Southern Hemisphere in the middle of summer and Presidential Elections and the constellations flipped upside down. Especially when now you have to find a new home for yourself and your baby daughter and your wife, and there has to be enough work to make it viable, and there have to be slopes or surf nearby, some kind of wilderness that helps you to keep from going totally crazy,and you’re worried, worried that all of it’s gonna close up like a fist that hits you square in the face.

That’s when you remember to trust in the flow.

In this case the flow was Kevin needing someone to help bust out some basement remodels. Really easy gigs. Re-hanging a few doors. Building a new planter-box. Framing some walls. Two days after I got here one of Kevin’s friends called up to find out of we could do some work on his house. He needed to get it ready to rent out, he said. He was heading to Romania indefinitely. “I know someone who’s looking for a place,” Kevin told him.

And that was it. Flow. There are scientific studies on it, and Obi One Kanobi and Mr. Miyagi characters who embody it. I don't really like to talk too much about it actually, because I'm afraid I'll ruin it. But all of us who paddle hard rapids or drop big mountain lines learn that broken down to its greatest common denominator, flow is the difference between life or death. My bro DJ and I--often scouting rapids--have discussed whether you can actually summon the flow, actually call for it. A couple times on the river it seemed to happen. “The lights coming on” is how we describe it.

Anyway, it’s rained eight out of the ten days I’ve been here, but a couple days ago the sun broke out and from the hilltops you could see the Cascades on one side and Olympic Peninsula on the other. Puget Sound below with sailboats tacking back and forth. I took out Kevin’s longboard--this bamboo deck he made himself--and got my first skate around the neighborhood. I couldn’t help but think of all the other times I’ve had my first solo runs and walks and skates around whatever new place I was moving to. There was the municipal slash-pile in Nederland ,Colorado. The hardpan desert floor of the Carson Valley in Gardnerville, Nevada. The condo-world that seemed never-ending until you reached the pier and checked the waves at Huntington Beach. There were the cobbled streets of San Telmo and the Dog Park next to the Mexican Barrio in Boulder. And on and on and on. I had a quiet first walk or roll through each of these places and felt like I was finally giving something of myself over to them. And that's when they started to feel at least a little like home.

I’ve often thought that finding your place was the story of my generation. But then it’s easy to cast everyone else as extras in your own self-directed movie (starring yourself). And plenty have chosen to stay at home and be content there. We don't all have to trot the world like coyotes.

But for those of us who believe in flow, the word denotes movement, speed, in going, coming, returning. And for me, at least for now, home is walking back up the hill on 25th, longboard under my arm, spinning the wheels, noticing little things, like the stained-glass windows in the Victorian houses, or how moss grows on the North side of the cedar shake roofs, but not really worrying about anything or even thinking about anything except that there are snowy mountains on both horizons, and I can’t wait to see Lau and Layla’s faces again.