Float On

A professor I had in undergrad, who taught classes on Hinduism and surveys of Eastern thought, and who had spent several years of his life with his wife and children living amongst poor villages in India, once described the solution to most of life’s challenges as the need to “float.”

Life, he said, is like a river, and it has very fast-moving portions, as well as very gentle portions that hardly seem to be moving at all. There are a great many turns and twists, hills and falls, caverns and cliffs, rocks and islands. And we humans, he explained, are essentially all sitting in our own “tubes” as we float down this river.

When we keep ourselves steady and just sort of lean back and let ourselves go with the flow of the river, it tends to be a pretty nice ride. Of course, there are always the bumps into rocks, the storms, and the occassional rapids, and we may have to hold on tightly and hope for the best during those moments, but they’re inevitable in all our journeys down the river. In general, we let ourselves have a gorgeous journey when we let ourselves “go with the flow.”

When we fight the flow of the river, he described the turmoil we caused ourselves. “Imagine,” he said, “you decide that you’re going to paddle upstream. Paddle up the falls you just thrilligly rode down. You try to kick against the current and fight your way completely opposite the flow of the water. How successful will you end up being? And how unpleasant will the experience be while you’re trying this?”

His point, at least as I have always understood it, is that when we allow ourselves the peace of mind described by Neibuhr’s serenity prayer (“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”), we let ourselves go with the flow of the Universe around us, and it tends to be a more peaceful ride. However, when we start fighting the flow of “the river” and try kicking and struggling to make it bend to what we perceive to be the “right” way of moving, we get a lot more bumps, bruises, scrapes, cuts. . . and we end up going in the direction the river was moving all along, anyway.

You may notice, no matter what religion or philosophy you connect most closely to, that the above analogy “fits” with something you’ve been taught. Buddhist, Catholic, Hindu, Lutheran, Jewish, Wiccan . . . all of them contain some notion of letting go, and accepting the pace at which things are moving. Not that you’re supposed to give up–that would be like tossing aside your tube in the river and going into dead-man-float pose and hoping you make it out alright. Of course, it doesn’t work that way.

But you’re supposed to relax a little bit. Stop trying so hard to make sure that you’re first in line for the Head Manager of The Universe And All Its Creatures position. Face it, you’ll never be the one chosen for that job, and I don’t care how many tithes you make or how good a life you lead. But we all, at one time or another, forget that, and we really, really strive to conform things–everything–to the way we want them to be, or the way we think they should be.

I have a point.

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Tie-in to the River analogy above? I realized that I stopped floating, stopped even paddling and kicking happily along my way, and started an all out struggle to force my tube to float in the direction and at the speed I wanted. And, guess what? It didn’t work! All it gave me was extra stress and worry.

So, Modest Mouse, I will float on, and thank you for the suggestion. Kickin’ back in my tube on this river, I notice that, yes, the speed of this portion of the ride (toward getting or not getting a job offer) is a bit slower than I’d choose, but in concentrating solely on that, I’ve missed out on all the pretty scenery around me: I’m going back to school for my final year as a student. I’m going to spend lots of time with N8, my best girlfriend Katie, The Mike, Shelly, Josh, and my other school pals that I probably won’t see very often after this year. My classes are all hand-selected, no “requirements,” and probably won’t be as intellectually vigorous as the past two years have been. I have so much to look forward to!

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Put another way, “Slliiiiiiiiiide.” (Insert penguin here.) (Fight Club fans, you know what I mean.)

Take care, and check 6.
And, Float On!

Labels: all about me, life update