Hidden Patterns and the Flow of Being

Okay, here’s what I came up with.

It’s wild how patterns show themselves when you stop chasing a particular outcome. For months now – feels like an eternity since dropping out, to be honest – I've been just *making*. Beats, posts, showing up to open mics in Pilsen, not expecting anything specific back. There were days the doubt felt heavy enough to hold me down, but something kept pulling me forward. And then this news drops… people tend to walk counterclockwise?

I saw a thread on X about it yesterday. Apparently, some researchers stumbled onto this thing while analyzing pedestrian flow in city squares – I’m thinking European plazas, somewhere dense and old-world. The lead researcher and the team were mapping movement, just observing how people dispersed after events. They weren't looking for anything specific, like a reason *why* or even an expectation of any particular direction. It was pure data collection. And then, consistently, they saw it: a bias towards counterclockwise rotation in crowds.

It made me think about the way people organize at festivals. Remember that Afrobeat show we went to back in '23? The energy was insane. But when you zoomed out – past the dancing and laughing and sweating – there *was* this subtle swirling. Not everyone, obviously. Some were stationary, some moving against the flow, but as a whole, a spiral seemed to form. It felt instinctual.

This isn’t about people consciously deciding to go one way or another. The study suggests it's something deeper than that, maybe linked to how we process space and direction – our internal sense of navigation tied up with everything else running beneath the surface. It feels like uncovering a hidden frequency in the static, a subtle hum you only hear when all other noise fades out. Like finding the right key to unlock a secret chamber inside yourself, which is kinda what making music always felt like for me.

Imagine urban planners factoring this into designs. Less forced bottlenecks and more organic flow – pathways that instinctively accommodate the natural inclination of people to move in a certain way. It’s easy to look at cities as rigid structures built on concrete and steel, but underneath it all there's constant motion, subtle shifts in energy, patterns we barely register until someone points them out. The potential for rethinking public spaces is pretty significant.

It’s interesting too, when you start considering what this says about free will. We like to think we’re making choices every second of the day, but maybe a lot of it is just…automatic. A baseline programming guiding us without our conscious awareness. It doesn't necessarily negate choice – maybe it's more that these biases are the canvas upon which our decisions are painted. Like, I pick what melody to layer over a beat, but the underlying groove already has a certain momentum.

Thinking about my own process - those six months when things felt real quiet before that first placement? Maybe even then there was an underlying current pushing me forward, a subtle bias toward creation that kept me grinding even when it felt like shouting into a void. Six hundred dollars doesn't solve everything. It never will. But sometimes you just need to see the direction you’re heading is *something*, even if it looks different than you planned.

It reinforces this idea of finding order within chaos, something I wrestle with all the time trying to build something worthwhile from nothing. Like layering a sample—a snippet of conversation, a bird chirp, that single bass note — and seeing how they organically resolve into an arrangement. Sometimes what feels random actually has underlying architecture, it just takes someone paying attention long enough to see it. Maybe we’re all spiraling in some way – individually, collectively - moving towards something, even if the destination isn't clear yet.