Leaning into the Flow

returning with some thoughts from throughout this past week

I am out with lanterns looking for myself -Emily Dickinson

I’ve been thinking about the maleability of our existance. How struggle is meant to be felt, life is meant to be enjoyed, this all isn’t really so serious. And the deepest of sorrows and the highest peaks of delight are meant to be felt in their entirety.

A great lesson of mine is learning to have peace with giving up control. I’ve always felt the need for it—the desperate clinging to anything that felt like control whenever I experienced turmoil or change, whenever the inevitable volatile nature of life sent waves crashing through something that I believed to be a certain way. I’m not sure where this obsession started—this pushing against a truth that we all know very deep in our souls but have just forgotten. I do know that because of this fear, I developed OCD at young age. Not that I knew what it was until high school, but for some reason, I felt how daunting the world could be, how subject to change, and chose to be scared of it, finding coping mechanisms to attempt to assert as much control as possible—my fellow OCD friends know this never works. Engaging in the behaviors only digs one deeper into the pit of fear and makes one more terrified of the world.

The thing about feeling pain, about grieving, about mourning the changing of something big whether it’s a friendship or move or relationship or manner of thinking, is that it forces you to be in the moment. It forces you to live slow. Sure, you can choose to distract and ruminate over the past and a future that does not exist, but time can’t really fly when you’re processing something like this. Time moves slow; that’s why it also hurts when someone tells you that time heals all wounds, because it can feel like time is taking too goddamn long.

But no, it’s very grounding. Very peaceful. I’m in the process of changing a way of living that I held onto before, a belief system, and as outside circumstances also begin to change around me, I realize that this is an opportunity to tune back into present living. To take it day by day, when I’ve been in a phase for months of moving fast, of my schedule being full, of not giving myself enough unplanned time to be without putting an expectation on myself to do something. I foresee myself spending a lot of time just being in the foreseeable future.

So I’ve been taking my time lately. I wrote a post many months ago On Slowing Down, when it was a practice I was newly working on incoorporating. At the start of this new year I fell back into moving relatively fast, but I find myself now in a transition again. In this reality, where change is shifting outside of my control and I can either decide to flow along with it or put up a fight that is futile and will cause me a great deal more of pain, I am falling very quickly into the need to move slow again. It’s a gutteral, deep call that feels almost like another force is pulling me into it. But I’ve found it necessary to take my time right now, in a very present way, in order to align with the flow. It means I’m taking my time with my feelings, too.

I have learned that there are seasons for everything—seasons for friendships, seasons for turmoil and change within partnerships, and some for flourishing alignment within them. There are seasons for thriving in healthy practices, and others where we lean into the shadow, don’t treat our bodies with tenderness and care, in order to learn something. Seasons for action and change, and some for reflection and observation. Some for great social activity and some for isolation.

My Substack has seasons, too—it has had meany seasons in its (almost) first year of life: a season of infancy, one of thriving enlightenment and creativity overdrive, one of essay-dominant work, one of mostly poetry, one of unalignment and instability, one of change and newness, and one right now that feels like embracing authenticity. There have been moments when my writing has felt forced. Moments where it has flowed effortlessly and truthfully from me like a cold river, and some when I have had to put work and struggle in it to get somewhere. But all of it is okay.

It’s okay to re-read the book you’ve read before because you can take more time with it this go around—look up words, muse over how the lessons apply to you differently. You can have a slow day. You can sit in boredom in traffic, or in the Midas Auto Repair lobby like I did the other day for an hour, with no journal or book and a refusal to stare at my phone screen, where I was forced to sit in my impatience and just exist. You can take some time to think and observe, rather than create, if nothing seems to click yet. We can be “unproductive.”

Things changing doesn’t mean you’ve failed. I think that’s something I’ve really struggled to grapple with—feeling like I’ve failed when things change from the way I preferred, or the way I became comfortable with it being. But a stagnant life is not a life of growth; a tomato plant will never bear fruit if it does not change in shape and size, move upwards, if its branches don’t thicken and become strong enough to hold a plump tomato. Change is what allowed me to get here—harrowing change that I wrestled with, change that took and left me hollow for awhile. Confusing change that required jumping in headfirst without knowing what was on the other side. And it got me here—to a lovely place—and that only means that great products come from change.

So when change comes again, as it will, it is something to be excited for, in all its discomfort and glory. That’s a lesson I’m beginning to accept, in the moments I step out of the spiral of my mind and ground in the moment and see it not as a puzzle to figure out and solve but as a wave, flowing. And when I lean into it in that relaxed way, there’s a feeling you can’t quite put to words that stirs together both nostalgia and excitement and also love and possibility that feels like a deep knowing, even though in it, you don’t know, but you do in a way because you trust—and that’s faith, I guess. That’s God and the Universe and the different names we all assign to the same thing, the same trusting and feeling of groundedness even when the earth under us is shifting and creating new landscapes. We keep learning to live in them, these new landscapes—to form communities on top of the new soil, learn to grow new fruit—and it’s exciting that there’s so much possibility, that we let the earth and the waves and the wind and the flames take us. The collective Us. Because truly, we’re all in it together.