Learning To Go With The Flow

Sometimes Life is Saying: Relax

Learning To Go With The Flow

2023, Jacquline Dacres ©

My brother and his teenage son are currently visiting me from England for two weeks. It has been a whirlwind of activities.

My brother wants to eat all the familiar comfort foods of home and is trying to pursue as many activities as possible for himself and his son. Of course, I somehow get dragged into all these adventures.

It has been great having them around, but all these activities take up a lot of my time. That’s time I could be using to write more or engage with my writing community.

Only two months ago, I would have felt extremely stressed out about this. That would have been because of the friction between what I wanted to do and what I was unable to do.

I would have felt overwhelmed by the number of notifications left unanswered on my Medium and Twitter accounts.

However, today I’m choosing to go with the flow. Today, I am choosing to not allow myself to be stressed. So, what changed?

1)I wrote an article called Clinging To The Past Limits Your Future Possibilities. Writing this article and recounting a part of my experience teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic forced me to take a critical look at myself.

I had allowed myself to over-work to the point of severe burnout and exhaustion. One of the main contributing factors to this situation was my extreme focus on doing things the “right way.”

Instead, I could have recognized that what was the “right way” yesterday may not be so today. I should have been willing to change and adapt to my present reality.

I have no intention of clinging to yesterday anymore. I’m moving forward into today.

2) For the same article that I wrote, I got a comment from Kevin Kaczmarski. He said, “…and when you fully surrendered, everything seemed to turn out the way it was supposed to!”

I re-read that phrase many times before I responded to the comment. The word ‘surrendered’ caught my attention.

Surrendering? I had never associated the word ‘surrender’ with myself. ‘Surrender’ sounded like giving up and I have never been a member of the giving up club.

However, there comes a point when we need to have the wisdom to understand that surrendering to the things that we cannot change does not mean that we are giving up. It means an acceptance of our current situation and finding ways to navigate this situation in a wise and safe manner.

3) Around the same time, I read an article by Marcus Wilson, Don’t Let Tomorrow Steal Today: How to Make the Most of the Present Moment

According to Marcus,

“In a Liberated Mind, Steven Hayes suggests the suffering we impose on ourselves is due to our focus on finding and fixing perceived problems in our lives. Accepting the reality of our current situation is critical.”

I interpreted this to mean that if we consistently choose to see the occurrences in our lives as problems then that’s exactly what they will be… problems.

What we often miss is that we are the ones who make the choice to interpret an event as a problem or not. An event is neither positive, negative, nor neutral until we say so. That’s why many people can experience the same event but have very different interpretations of that event.

The inability to answer my notifications in the usual speedy manner is not a problem until I say it is a problem. I’m choosing to not have that interpretation.

With this new mindset, I began to see how taking part in the various activities with my brother has been beneficial for me. It has forced me to take long breaks from the consistency of being around the computer. I needed that break, and I would not have taken it willingly.

Not only was life giving me the opportunity to take a break, but it was also giving me the opportunity to have new experiences and to enjoy the company of my brother and my nephew.

If I was busy fighting against the flow of life as I usually do and insisting on doing things how I wanted them done, I would have experienced stress.

So, it has been taking me longer to answer and respond to my notifications but that’s the reality of my current situation. My brother and my nephew have a few days left and I’m planning to take the time to enjoy their presence.

Time spent with family is precious — and we don’t get time back.

Lesson: Life is never against you. Life is for you. Go with the flow of life, you can’t stop it anyway.

You can follow me on:

Twitter and LinkedIn where I share my ideas on personal development and my writing journey.