Pushing the River

There's a story about a person who pushes the river to change life. Caught up in fear, they try to stop the water from moving where it needs to go.

I've been thinking about this story a lot lately. How we think the point of life is to step into direction, into doing. Forcing the flow of life into some coherently assembled timeline of events that leads to some predicted outcome. This is the scientific method colonizing our mind. This is our fear of the divine in real time. This is the ordered streets of suburbia charting maps across our consciousness.

I've spent most of my life moving between active architect and releasing to the unknown. The difference has often been subtle. I am an architect when I attempt to design an outcome. To bend the river into the shape I think I need. To slow the current. To speed it up.

I forget I'm not just the person that pushes the river. This is lesson of most spirituality and non-organized religion. Faith over fear. Let go. Let God.

I don't believe in regret, but I do wonder how things may have played if I'd remembered I was part of a greater undercurrent infinitely more vast and wild and wonderful than my overworked little monkey mind. Maybe I'd have taken less wrong turns. Less bypasses. Less side routes that took me further and further away from myself and my path. Less holding on to what was never mine to begin with.

I'm still grateful for the misdirection. The mishaps. The mistakes. The reminders arising from this season:

I'm not just the person pushing the river.

I am the river.