Your Days are Like Rain on the Landscape of Your Life
Learn to balance action and acceptance.
Rain will always find the path of least resistance back to the sea.
It flows through the landscape, finding the weakest points. Over time, its grinding force carves and alters it. The landscape changes.
This is what happens to your life too.
From the moment you wake up, your day is like rain falling atop a mountain. The water hits the ground and immediately starts asking questions of you.
Which way will it flow?
What are you going to do?
Two ways of being.
This analogy leads me to two, seemingly contradictory, conclusions.
The first is to use discipline and willpower to override our tendency to seek out the path of least resistance. (I argued this myself). This is generally the view taken by the self-help and productivity community.
Eat that frog; do the reps.
It's all about delaying gratification now in the name of a future pay-off.
It means building dams and gullies in an attempt to guide the water where it wouldn’t naturally go, but where you want it to go.
My second conclusion though is not about doing, but rather about being.
Much like standing by the side of a stream and noticing the water as it goes by, I do not try to change it.
I only accept that it is.
It’s easy to mistake this as being passive—it’s not. It’s about noticing what arises in every moment without judgement.
It’s the equanimity of knowing that the water will find its way, with or without our input.
Like two sides of a coin, both perspectives are valid—but need each other to balance themselves out.
Too much planning is dangerous.
Very often, a plan is nothing more than a desired sequence of events.
You want to finish that marathon, get that job or buy that house.
And those goals are admirable things. They give our lives direction and purpose.
But build too many expectations and you’ll only increase the amount of frustrations when things won’t go your way.
Your child wanting to help you cut the carrots for dinner?
Your co-worker interrupting your focus to chit-chat?
Your cat lying across your stomach as you’re trying to read?
These moments are interruptions because they’re preventing us from achieving what we set out to do: to get dinner ready as soon as possible, to meet a looming deadline, to relax by reading a book.
The thing is, these moments are life.
Ignoring them is tantamount to ignoring life as it unfolds in front of you.
Finding balance.
Just like rain cannot be forced to fall exactly down the mountain as you wish, you cannot force life’s events to happen in the way you planned.
A degree of compromise and humility is needed.
On one side action, guidance and desire; on the other, observation, non-judgement and acceptance.
It’s important to dream, for sure, but do so too forcefully and stress will find you too easily. You can live with it for a while, if you think it’s worth it. But you cannot live an entire life like that.
It’ll be over before you know it.
Between our aspirations and what actually happens is life. So let's try to relax enough into it in order to enjoy it.
The rain, after all, will find its way back to the sea.
With or without you.
Till next time,
Ben
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Love that metaphor. 👏 (And the photo of Skye!)
A refreshing post. I appreciate you discussing the need for balance between doing and being. These topics are usually presented as one or the other. And this-> "It’s easy to mistake this as being passive—it’s not. It’s about noticing what arises in every moment without judgement."