A client insightfully expressed concern about the danger of there being a pattern their relationships and a desire to understand the pattern in order to prevent its perpetuation. A picture instantly popped into my mind that seemed very random and tangential. It was the idea of tubing down the river. I was about to excuse that as me being distracted and unfocused, after all it is the time of year to start hitting the Frio and the Comal, when the phrase go with the flow floated by.
This seems like a good motto. It makes for a smooth ride. No rapids, no turbulence, no resistance, no work, no red under arms from having to paddle in an innertube. If you have never been tubing than that last one may not make much sense. That is all fine and well – makes for a good ride so long as the river is flowing where you want it to go.
You can defer your preference, needs, and desires to those around you who will be more than willing to carry you along. They will be about their own direction – and so long as that direction is towards the direction you want and the water is flowing with out disturbance you are fine with being along for the ride – but when you aren’t and when it is not why are you still going along for the ride?
In our contemporary cultural view, the common or predominate perception – rivers are for recreation and for hydroelectricity (mainly). In recreation when the rapids are ahead folks navigate to the shore and walk it out and then reenter the river. We change the river to get what we want for it build dams, lakes, and drown out ecosystems to syphon their life off to other places. Outside of these things river do not hold much of a place in most of our lives.
This is a modern view of rivers over only the last 100 years or so. Prior to that, in human history rivers were not only the source of life but the sole source of rapid transportation and a means of moving safely and sustainably to another region. You kind of just had to go where the river would go. If the river is headed south there wasn’t much good in arguing with it to go a different direction. So you went south, too. I would think of this as a feminine paradigm.
I was today years old when the American male child’s Obsession with train sets and railroads finally made some sense. The fascination for railways altered the river’s dominance in deciding where humans were going to go. It was deciding where to go and being able to lay tracks in any direction you chose. Free from the flow of the river and engineer of his own destiny and destination. That is the excitement every boy hears and what is behind every choo-choo.
Here is the trick though – tracks aren’t natural and organic extensions of us. They take a lot of sweat and energy to manufacture and to lay. Not only does it require work it requires pre-thought and organization to execute. It demands that structure exists in order for anything material to spring from or to redirect the natural and organic flow of the world. To contain it. A masculine paradigm.
What am I advocating for here? Well, I simply providing thought as tool for constructing understanding about one’s agency and how they choose to handle it and how it leads to How you conduct or are carried in life. Go with the flow is a way to transit life – if you will accept your arrival being determined by others.
