I’ve noticed…that I am rarely (if ever) in perfect flow.
What I mean is, because I’m still tinkering with too much of the details of my life — assessing them, organizing them — I never fully let them translate who I am to where I am and to those around me. The combination of perfecting myself, in the context of truly serving the needs of others, not only stunts my growth, but inhibits my ultimate sense of being — which is really where the crux of my existence and where the meaning of it lies.
A little more of this and a little less of that pails in significance against the scale of any perfection I can give to someone else. The real value of what is in me is what flows from me or through me. And, because of that dynamic, what is really significant then is the flow within me, not the perfection of me (although some of that tends to happen in the state of flow). The irony is that it is in the process of giving myself that I actually gain what I need and it is that service to the needs around me that ultimately matters the most.
One metaphor may help illustrate this: a reservoir. Often, under this premise, we see it as our job to distribute some of what we have accumulated in our reservoir, but never at the expense of being fully depleted. Accordingly, we are constantly monitoring how much we think we have to give and pretty oriented to what we have to preserve. A better metaphor of what we can be, at least in terms of water, might be that of a spring. Understanding where what we have to distribute comes from can be illuminating. If we try to manage a spring like a reservoir, the less this true resource actually gets distributed to where it needs to go.
The source of a spring is relatively infinite, and if we were to recognize and believe that orientation about ourselves to the world, the less preoccupied we might be with self-preservation and the more we might be freed up to be in the business of distributing the water that flows through us — after all, that is from the source of all life and is a sustenance of it.
I want to learn more about less tinkering and more release. In other words, how to...let it flow.
