This too shall pass
There’s some stuff that just passes with time. It’s important to remember this whenever I have the urge to fix something so quickly.
The weather is an obvious example. Whenever it’s rainy out, I don’t have the power to reach up into the sky and switch off the water like a faucet. The best I can do is find an umbrella. And even if I can’t find an umbrella, the rain will stop eventually.
There’s this balance between how much energy it requires for me to just be patient with the rain and sit through it and get a little wet versus the energy it requires to get up and go searching for an umbrella. It’s not always an easy decision to make because you don’t know how long the rain will last and if it will get better or worse.
If I knew the rain would stop and the sun would come out in a few minutes, I would just sit right there and get a little wet and wait for the sun to come out and dry me. But if I knew it was going to keep raining for hours and it might even start to lightning, then I might think a little harder about getting up and going to find shelter.
Our emotions can be like weather.
In a relationship with someone else, you might be mad at them. Maybe they did something that harmed you. Right in the moment, your anger will be strong. If you try to handle the situation right then and there, it might be harder to deal with your anger. If you wait, your anger will weaken. Then it will be easier to see the broader picture and let go of your anger and forgive.
In your relationship with yourself, you might feel sad about something. Maybe you were really hoping for something that didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to. Right in the moment, you’ll be very sad. You might even become depressed. And you might not like the feeling of depression, so you’ll try to change it. The most obvious way to change sadness from loss or failure is to go out and get something else or succeed in some other way. So you put all your energy into that striving again. What’s really going on is you’re trying to get away from that sadness. But that sadness will go away on its own over time. Your life will change and you’ll want other things and you’ll have hope again and you’ll gradually forget how sad you were before.
It does seem that there are some exceptions. Not all emotions are like the weather that always changes. Some emotions are more like diamonds buried deep down in the earth. It is still true that even those deep diamonds will eventually unearth and change into another form, but the process is much longer than the passing of a rainstorm.
With the deep diamonds, there might be more proactivity required on your part to change the situation. You might need to do the excavation to get deep down into yourself and dig up what’s going on inside of you so that you can bring it to the surface and wash it and break it open and grind it to dust and scatter it to the wind. Lately, breathwork has been helping me to do this with my own emotions.
And it’s not all about emotions. We live in a manifestation of reality that is dynamic. Things are changing around us all the time. In nature, the wind blows and rivers flow. In the city, cars are constantly on the streets and people are moving around in buildings. There is a universal energy that takes different forms to make all this motion happen.
You can practice jiu jitsu with that universal energy. Jiu jitsu is a martial art that’s about using your opponent’s weight as your advantage. Your opponent is really going to help you. They’re not your opponent at all. But you have to have the intelligence in order to use their strength to your advantage, even if they’re trying to use their own strength for their own advantage.
So the skills that are required to navigate life are not always quick decision and swift action. Sometimes they are awareness and understanding and patience. But there still comes a time for action.
And maybe it depends on what type of predator you are. A camouflaged octopus buries itself in the sand on the ocean floor and blends in, waiting for its prey to pass by before striking out with a tentacle in one swift motion. A cheetah sees its prey on the savanna and gets up to chase it before finally tackling it to the ground.
And even those are very active examples. Trees and plants just stand there and soak up the sun when it rises and drink the water when it rains. Plant life takes whatever energy the rest of life gives them without going after it.
At this stage of human evolution, we’re in an interesting spot. It’s easier to survive. The motivations of hunger and thirst are less strong. We also have less natural predators. So we can afford to be more patient and calm and still survive.
But even when we weren’t at the top of the food chain, complete submission to the flow of life was still an option. Think of what happens with a tree. If a bulldozer comes to knock it down, it doesn’t move. There is a calm and slow submission to the way of things.
Chasing down prey assumes a goal. We’re a very goal-oriented species. But if you’re not trying to get somewhere, you can be more patient. You can passively accept what life gives you instead of trying so hard to take what you want.
But even that chasing down of prey is natural. If you have the motivation of hunger and you’re in a body that’s capable of hunting, the natural thing is to hunt and eat.
I think these are the questions for us as a species: Are we behaving naturally? Are we in flow?