I Flow

In my last article I focused on a few lines by John O’Donohue.

I would love to live, as the river flows

Carried by the surprise of its own unfolding

When I wrote it, I was focused on the river, but since publishing it my mind has been turning over the word flow. While away on a retreat recently someone introduced me to two simple words – Drive and Care.

I’ve known about drive all my life. Push harder, dig deeper, lean in. I learnt it from cycle racing when I was younger and a thousand other little ways through the years.

A synonym for care, is flow. Flow is about attention. Where is my attention? If my attention is fixed on kindness – either received from the divine, from other, from my deepest self and then ministered to my every thought feeling and action. Then shared in every interaction – that is flow. Flow is the attention to care.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with drive per se. it gets things done and keeps things moving forwards. But there is something I hadn’t realised, or to be honest chose not to realise. I intuited it, but it served me to ignore it. What I realised was drive comes with a cost. There were actually two costs. The first cost was that I had to keep on drawing energy from somewhere and the second cost was how care-lessly I treated myself in the process.

What the second half of life has gently...no, painfully…shown me, was that there was a wounded me I was ignoring. It went as deep as its possible to go in a person, but I worked (notice the word there – ‘worked’), at ignoring the wounds, the deficits, the aches. I pushed down what was difficult, I drew energy from avoiding my insecurities, and assumed that if I rode over myself enough times, the unwanted parts of myself would stay down and go away. ‘Ghosts’ is how Thich Nat Hahn beautifully describes them. Whispers and intimations of death, loss, soul hunger, of the deeper unbefriended parts of myself. Drive served me well. Until it didn’t. Even as I write this, I see that default desire to stride out in almost everything I do and every new idea I have. Yes, something as simple as writing this blog can be both drive and care, drive and flow. The drive to fill the void of having written nothing for a few weeks, of wanting to be noticed and admired for having wisdom, is subtly mixed in with the flow of wanting to share what I have received.

Of course, as I increasingly realised that there was a deeper, truer me buried deep inside those closed cupboards, I wanted to both come home to myself and avoid myself in equal measure. The pain of this dilemma was obvious. If I want more of me to offer the world, then that me is buried alongside that wound. To get to the life, there had to be an encounter with what would feel like a death. There isn’t one single serious explanation to human transformation, religious or secular, that doesn’t have a version of, ‘you need to die before you die, in order to really live’.

James Hollis frames the pathway to transformation in this way, ‘The good news and the bad news are both the same: we are asked to die[1]’. Only through this process is our real creativity, our life-force freed up. A thousand resurrections are born out of a thousand little deaths along our life journey. Therapists and those who have been on a therapy-journey will testify to this truth. Death essentially means the confrontation with the reality that there is no life there anymore, whether in that job, relationship, attitude, habit, whatever. To face into this truth is what Marion Gilbert[2] calls, ‘the unwelcome proposition’. The choice to face the ghosts, the wounds, the what-feel-like-deaths.

And what do you discover there? Flow. Life in its essence, my life, your life, all life, is a flow. It turns out that drive is a dance with our deeper flow. Sometimes it makes us so much more and sometimes it stamps on our toes. Drive at its best is an active response, it is not a drive that seeks to push the water uphill. It comes from our deep source, seeking to find its unique you-shaped expression in the world. As soon as we resist it, fight it or drive it, it really doesn’t last that long. Why? Because it is depleting us, not nurturing and recreating us. Anyone who has had burnout knows what I’m talking about. They will all point to a period of their life where they tried to drive a car with no petrol in it, until it was eventually running only on fumes…and then stopped. It is a subtle shift from flow to drive, but what it ends up manifesting is our unattended neediness, ghosts of loss and inner hungers; our wounds, that all need to be fed.

I have loved Rilke’s poem The Bell Tower[3] for years, but recently I finally felt like I understood the last two lines. After line after line of describing the journey of transformation, he ends up with these words.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

So much of our drive is about trying to get the world to hear us and to see us and to validate us, in order to repair the deep deficits we feel.

Say to the silent earth: I flow.

I am now seeking to flow into more of my life, down whatever channels of relationships and opportunities the day provides. I am more aware of not pushing or driving my way into feeling ok about myself.

and

to the rushing water speak: I am

“I am”, is the ultimate peace of a life that is rooted and grounded in a deep sense of loving kindness.

I am.

The rest is flow.

[1] James Hollis   What Matter Most  Gotham Books  2010

[2] Marion Gilbert https://mariongilbert.com

[3] Rillke The Bell Tower  www.youtube.com/watch?v=9waa9Q-RZxQ