Barking at the Moon

Spiritual Seeking in the Age of Science


Go With The Flow

Podcast

Are there larger forces that shape the course of our lives?


As a human, and particularly an American, I like to think that I chart my own course in life. Free will, and all that. Part of that is cultural, as mine is a society that values independence and initiative. It's also very much an aspect of my personality. I believe the phrase my friends lovingly use is “control freak.” I'm sure they mean that in a good way.

The way I live my life is tied in no small way to my work ethic. If you want something, get up off of the couch and do something about it. If it's difficult to achieve, try hard. If that's not working, try harder. Sitting in a corner complaining about how bad your life is will do nothing except wear out the corner. Your life will not get any better. No effort, no reward. This is my default perspective.

That doesn't sound like a bad thing, and often it's not. There are many things about my life that I love, and they wouldn't have happened had I not take action. The problem is that over time, this reinforces the notion that the solution to any problem I have in life is more effort. If things aren't going my way, my internal dialogue is typically strict and unforgiving. Don't whine about it, do something about it. Work harder, work smarter, but whatever you do, get up off your lazy posterior and work.

As anyone who's been around for a while knows, life just isn't that simple. If I had any common sense, I would have recognized the flaw in this thinking many years ago. It's not difficult to understand. I'm five foot ten and don't have a particularly athletic build. If I want to play professional football for the NFL, I can try as hard as possible, for as long as possible, and I'm still never going to be anything more than something these guys scrape off of their cleats at the end of a game. I've met some of these guys. They're not nearly as small as they look on TV. I've come to realize that there is a larger world around me, and many things are simply beyond my capabilities.

Even so, while I'm not completely stupid, I have nonetheless chosen to ignore this basic fact many times in my life because of my default perspective. If I'm trying to get something done and it's just not working, I never stop to consider whether or not it's realistic. To a certain degree, that's an instinct I value. There are many times in life when the only problem is that you have to work harder or longer before you succeed. If I trained myself to give up at the first sign of trouble, I would rarely accomplish anything. I don't need an excuse to be lazy. What I need is more clarity in my perception so that I can tell the difference between a goal that's just difficult to achieve versus a complete waste of time. I've wasted a lot of time.

I spend a fair amount of time in retrospection. I look back both short term and long term to see what's working, what's not, and why. What I've noticed is a pattern when things aren't working. I try, encounter difficulty, and then try again. This happens several times before I see that it's not an individual incident, it's the bigger picture that's not cooperating. I may take a break for a period of time, but eventually I'll come back and give it another go.

Sometimes I'll try different approaches. Other times I'll try the same things again. Something about the definition of insanity comes to mind. What I won't do is quit unless I've exhausted all possible paths and resources. Even then I rarely get the point. It's only been in the last few years that I've seen things differently. Apparently some of us are more stubborn than others.

I am a creative creature. I worked for many years as a musician, I've written books, spoken at conferences, developed software, directed videos and done a few other things that all come from that artistic place within us. That's what makes this so embarrassing. When I create, I know when it's working and when it's not, and I've learned to recognize that it's a waste of time to keep banging on something creative when you're just not in the groove. And yet, I've never applied that to my life in general.

There's a common experience among the artistic when things are going your way that's known by many names. I'll just call it the flow. You may have heard athletes talk about being in the zone, or a martial artist talk about Zen. It's all the same thing. It's a state where you're completely immersed in what you're doing to the exclusion of all else. You'll hear people talk about being at one with what they're doing, and that's a pretty good description.

When I'm writing and I'm in the flow, it comes out as fast as I can type. The room doesn't exist. The computer doesn't exist. All the problems I had today are gathered at the local bar down the street having a drink. They're not in the room with me. All that exists are my thoughts, and they just seem to magically flow through my fingers into my computer. It's the same experience with everything else that's creative. It's effortless, almost magical. It has nothing to do with working hard.

You'll hear people talk about writer's block. That means different things to different people, but for me it's the opposite experience from the flow. I'm just not feeling it. My logical mind can walk me through the steps, tell me what to do, and I can even type words and construct sentences. When I had book deadlines or other things to get done and I wasn't in the flow, I could make myself sit down and do it anyway. The results were consistently bad. I don't mean not great. I mean actively bad.

This is easier to recognize on a small scale. If I'm trying to get an article done and it's simply refusing to cooperate, it's not long before I realize that I'm wasting my time. In those moments I'm capable of turning off the computer and walking away. Live to fight another day, and all that. What's been more difficult is seeing this in the cycles of my life.

There's a lot I don't understand about this being human thing, but I've observed that my life has transitioned through many cycles, each distinct in personality. I know that might sound obvious in some ways. You get out of school and party for a while, that's one cycle. You get married and settle down, that's another. Then you have kids and everything changes yet again. These are what I think of as physical cycles. The vibe of your life is driven by the choices you make. The work harder part of me is fine with that reality, but with sufficient introspection I realized it wasn't the only player in the game.

Nebulous and difficult for my inner geek to accept, I've found that there are larger forces in life. Powerful, hard to define and perilous to ignore. These are major influences that shape the course of my existence. Whether or not I'm actually aware of them is another story.

The reason it took so long for me to see the effect of these forces was something that's hard to complain about. I've experienced a lot of good fortune. While I'd like to take credit for each and every success, if I'm honest with myself there are also a lot of great things that have happened purely because I'm lucky. I just happen to be at the right place at the right time, be the guy with the right combination of abilities that someone just happens to be looking for, or follow a path that I just happened to bump into only to find it was the yellow brick road. Looking in rearview mirror I can see it happen so many times that it's way too hard to ignore.

That's all well and good when it's working, and it worked for me my entire life. One lucky break after another. Eventually I started believing that it was all about my approach to life. Work hard, don't give up, good things will happen. Then I hit a decade when I simply couldn't do anything right. I still had the same ambitions, still had the same work ethic, but no matter how hard I banged on a project it just wasn't going to work. I didn't see the pattern. I only saw the individual failures. Predictably, my solution was to just work harder.

All my life, I've been in harmony the general flow of larger forces, swimming with the current, so to speak. When I left home to be a musician, that was in the flow and good things happened. I reached a point where I wanted to settle down, have a stable career, maybe a family. Once again the flow had changed and I was in complete harmony with it. Things just fell together for me. I never considered the chicken and egg question of whether my actions were creating the flow or the flow was guiding my actions.

This sort of thing repeated until I hit trouble. I finally realized that the flow of my life at that point in time was all about introspection, deeper meaning and pondering the mysteries. Instead, I was working on projects, trying to make things happen, doing the same things I'd always done. However, for the first time in my life I was not in harmony with the flow, and absolutely nothing I tried would work.

In hindsight, part of the problem is the fact that I've spent my entire life pondering the mysteries. It's just a part of who I am. My inner geek argues with my inner hippie, but they're really the best of friends, and I couldn't live without either. Introspection is a normal part of my day to day life. However, that daily contemplation is a very different thing from putting your entire life on hold to immerse yourself in introspection, which I'd never done. It never even occurred to me that it could be a thing.

Nonetheless, the more I looked at where I was and what the decade had been, it was clear that this was exactly what the flow was about. Sure, work a job, do the laundry, take care of business. Beyond that, however, the priority was naval gazing, not action. Once I realized what was going on, true to my nature, I did something about it. I brought everything I was working on to a full and complete stop. All projects went on indefinite hold, no new projects were started no matter how appealing. I worked, did the laundry, took care of business and spent the rest of my time contemplating life. I became the hermit in the cave.

Suddenly, everything started getting easier. Sure, I was trying to do less so there was less to go wrong, but I'm talking about the overall experience of my life. Some days are good, some days fight you tooth and nail. I'd had almost a decade of the latter, and suddenly that faded into the background. The days began to feel effortless again, more in the zone. I could tell that I was making the right choices.

Eventually, there came a time when I could once again feel the flow of things shift in a new direction. For the first time in my life I was actually looking for it. You can be sure that I altered my goals, plans and activities accordingly. No point learning lessons if you don't apply them.

Part of what I learned from all of this was the answer to my chicken and egg question. All those years of my life when I was so lucky and things just seemed to magically happen for me wasn't the result of creating the flow through my efforts. Rather, I think that at a subconscious level I've always felt what the flow was and let that guide my actions, instinctively knowing when it was time to change course, and how to set my sails. The wind only disappeared when I stopped paying attention to that.

To completely alter my actions and act counter to my default work ethic, based solely on some bit of hippie naval gazing, required a significant degree of faith in my instincts. That would have been hard had there not been so many examples over the course of my life to reassure me. It's difficult for a control freak like me to trust invisible forces and just expect it all to sort itself out. And yet, it's hard to argue with what works in my life.

Are there larger forces that shape our lives, like rivers powerful enough to sweep us along with the current whether we like it or not? Is there a reason that things just magically seem to go our way when we go with the flow? Or am I just barking at the moon?

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