Do You Push The River?

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DO YOU PUSH THE RIVER?

What does it mean to “push the river”?  Imagine that you are sitting on the banks of your favorite river watching the river doing its own natural thing. Then suddenly you decide that you want the river to flow in a different direction. Wow! Can you make it happen? Not in a million years. You can not push the river for the river is governed by immutable universal laws. Well, Katheryn, that seems pretty mundane, don’t you think? Yes, in fact it is so mundane that it escapes us, especially when we speak metaphorically about the river of our own life.

Do you ever try to push the river? Of course you do. I know that because that is what humans do. Life is not treating us “right”. Things are not fun, they are not fulfilling, they are not promising and in fact, they seem pretty grim at the moment. Sometimes that lasts a day, sometimes it lasts a week and sometimes it lasts even longer. We long for something that feels good. We look around us and we see others who seem to be feeling good, whose lives seem to be moving along quite well. We feel stuck and so we begin to resist. We want out of this place NOW and we mean business. It does not occur to us that the river of our life is moving in exactly the direction it needs to move. Neither does it occur to us that there are amazing spiritual jewels to be gotten from this uncomfortable place in which we find ourselves.

Sometimes we can not see the obvious/mundane which is our universal truth. The flow of our lives can not be altered. It is said by wise ones that we don’t have a choice as to what we are given. A small amount of reflection will make that truth obvious. What we do have is complete control over how we respond. Often we respond by getting into the touchy business of trying to push the river, a hopeless endeavor. We are unhappy and even frightened at times by the situation in which we find ourselves. It is a rare human being who would welcome reversal into their life.  Yet at some point we must embrace the message hidden within the challenge in order to grow and move on. So it was that I came across this quote which is mundane and simplistic unless you look more deeply.

For after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is to let it rain.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow