We all know how to be a success in life, right? We set our alarms so that we can get up before the sun rises and we work our asses off all day. We do twice as much as everyone else, put in lots of overtime, and keep working right up until we go to bed. And some of us actually keep working in our dreams, mulling over the day while we sleep, running through scenarios for when we go back to work tomorrow. We even have lots of inspirational sayings to reinforce our work-a-holic thinking.
“The early bird catches the worm.”
“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
“Stay positive, work hard, and make it happen.”
Yay! Let’s get out there and WORK!
But what if all of that is wrong? In fact, what if most of it is bullshit?
The Taoists have an interesting concept called Wu Wei, which can be loosely translated as, “doing nothing,” and they say that it’s a major key to success. A more accurate translation might be, “purposeful inaction,” and the basic idea is that the harder we work, the behinder we get. Taoists love to use rivers and lakes and water in general as metaphors, so we can do that to explain Wu Wei.
Suppose that you’re floating down a beautiful, green river in your little Rowboat of Life. There’s a gentle current that’s carrying you along nicely and you’re making good forward progress. It’s so quiet and peaceful and you can feel the sun warming your face and body. Perhaps you let one hand trail behind you in the crystal clear water and for just a moment it feels like everything is absolutely perfect.
BUT . . . you suddenly decide that you want to go faster, because faster must be better, so you grab your oars and you row like hell until you’re exhausted. And you really haven’t gotten much further down the river. All you’ve accomplished is to wear yourself out when you could have been just drifting along, enjoying the ride.
But WAIT! You remind yourself that drifting is wrong! Drifting is bad! We need to be GOAL ORIENTED and MOVING FORWARD with MAXIMUM ENERGY AND MOTIVATION at all times. By now, you know that rowing forward didn’t accomplish much, so you start paddling your Rowboat of Life from one side of the river to the other, just to be doing SOMETHING. After all, you’re the Captain of your Rowboat! YOU determine where you’re going and YOU’RE in charge of your destiny!
Eventually you realize that you’re making even less forward progress and after a while you get discouraged and put your paddles back in the boat. You drift along thinking about it and beating yourself up for not making more effort. Maybe a dragonfly lands on your nose while you’re cogitating. “Am I lazy?” you ask the dragonfly. “Do I just not have what it takes to be a winner?”
As you work it all out in your head, you realize that WINNERS KEEP GOING, no matter what the odds are against them. Real winners are willing to work as hard as they can and then DIG DEEP to find that last reserve of energy to carry them across the finish line! The harder you work, the more it proves that you’ve GOT WHAT IT TAKES, by god!
So just to prove how hard you work and how inspired you are, you turn your Rowboat of Life around and start paddling AGAINST the current. You struggle and you strain and at a certain point you have a massive coronary and die, but at least you died a winner, right?
The whole point of this, of course, is that there are underlying currents of energy in the Universe. They actually help us get to our goals if we just surrender to them and go with the flow. Life isn’t an enemy. Life isn’t something we have to fight. Nature isn’t something we’re supposed to conquer. We are meant to float as gently on the currents of life as a blossom drifting down a broad, quiet river.
Most of the New Thought writers and speakers have this concept as a central pillar of their philosophy. In Choose Them Wisely: Thoughts Become Things! Mike Dooley talks about visualizing your goal in general terms and then moving toward it. BUT he emphasizes very strongly that we don’t need to sweat the details about how we’re going to get there. The Universe will provide the means and the ways and the paths once we get in harmony with the flow.
Louise Hay, in You Can Heal Your Life writes, “I believe in a power far greater than I am that flows through me every moment of every day . . . Out of this One Intelligence comes all the answers, all the solutions, all the healings, all the new creations.”
In Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires Esther Hicks/Abraham, says, “Well-Being is the basis of the Universe. Well-Being is the basis of All-That-Is. It flows to you and through you. You have only to allow it. Like the air you breathe, you have only to open, relax, and draw it into your being.”
In other words, there is a current of energy, of love, that underlies the entire Universe and our, “job,” our only true, “work,” is to align ourselves with that energy current and drift along on it, knowing that it will take us where we want to go.
The Fool Tarot card is the perfect illustration of this. She dances along on the edge of a cliff, filled with the energy of love, totally unconcerned about where she’s going or how. She’s in the flow. She’s dancing with the energy and if she walks off of the cliff, she’ll just walk on air.
So . . . how do we get to the Flow and how do we know when we’re out of it? How do we know when we’re paddling up the river, instead of riding the current?
According to Esther Hicks/Abraham, we actually have a compass in our little Rowboat of Life. It’s called emotions. And we can check that compass anytime that we want to. HOW DO YOU FEEL? If you feel crappy, angry, sad, or resentful, you’re paddling upstream. If you feel happy, joyous, free, and content, then you’re floating down the river with a dragonfly perched on your nose. If you’re not feeling anything at all, if you’re emotionally flat and apathetic, then your Rowboat is stuck on a freaking sandbar. So the key is to get up every morning and say, “Woo Hoo! I’m alive and I love it!”
We all need to stay in touch with our Woo Hoos a lot more than we are. We can do that.
Of course, all of this is totally un-American. Hard work and a lot of sweat are the answers. Anyone who says different is plain Fool-ish.
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