(From Handbook For Humans)
Imagine a powerfully flowing river. Imagine, also, that we’re trying with all our might to walk upstream in that great river.
It’s a real battle. We want to be separate, to go our own way, and the river just keeps beating and beating against us. Our effort seems endless, and the river seems so implacable, so heartless, so relentless. In fact, the river seems to be totally against us, totally opposed to everything we’re trying to do. Life seems like such a struggle.
The thing to notice is that the river is not against us in any way; it’s not trying to direct energy in opposition to us. It’s simply flowing the way it’s flowing. It is our own resistance that’s creating our problem. And notice that it’s our problem, because the river doesn’t have a problem. Again, it’s simply flowing the way it’s flowing.
Now imagine turning around in that river, feeling its direction and then aligning ourselves with it, letting go of our resistance and just allowing ourselves to float with the river—to find its will, so to speak. Immediately then our struggle diminishes and our clarity improves.
When we’re no longer struggling with the river but can let ourselves align with it, we see and function so much better. Flowing with the river, floating down it, surrendered to its vastly larger existence, we can see the banks of reality more clearly and thus make more appropriate choices.
Moreover, instead of having to cling to the bank in our struggle, we can let go of it. We can trust that life knows more than we do. We know that the outcome, whatever it is, is what it needs to be. Rather than trying to get the river of existence to adjust to us, we adjust to it.
At the deepest level we release the outcome, we let go of how it all needs to turn out. Existence will take care of that perfectly well. Our job is just to align our atom with the river’s vastness, to deeply surrender to the way it is right now, in great trust and gratitude.
© 1997 by James Sloman
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