What is special about our everyday activities is that they occur within the ceaseless flow of many unfolding strands of spontaneously responsive, living activity. This requires us to adopt a kind of fluid, process thinking, a shift from thinking of events as occurring between things existing as separate entities prior to their interaction, to events occurring within a continuously unfolding, holistic but stranded flow of events, with no clear, already existing boundaries to be found anywhere – a flow of events occurring within intra-actions in which we ourselves are also immersed. Bringing the nature of these flowing processes to light requires the use of concepts of a kind very different from the well-defined concepts expressive of theories or models. I have called them prospective, descriptive concepts, and below I explore their nature and their use in characterizing how our surroundings can influence the unfolding shape of our utterances and other expressions within them.
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