The Flexibility of Water

We will never know what lies ahead. Not really anyway. We can plan and we can dream, but we don’t control what comes next. No one does. What happens next for me is impacted by what happens for you, or at least by what just happened to the guy standing behind me in line for coffee. Don’t forget to factor in the weather either, and the final score of the big game last night. Tiny ripples moving outward from each of us and from everything, colliding.

Uncertainty and what comes next are always a package deal. That’s just how it goes. And we either embrace that fact or fight against it. Either way, we still don’t control the future. Just our attitudes and the effort we put into setting ourselves up for our best chances of our dreams coming true. Even then, flexible dreams have better odds of becoming reality. Multiple happy outcomes versus only focusing on one.

Seth Godin shared a blog recently titled Might as well quit. It’s short. Eighteen sentences that fit in a single screenshot. But my two sentence summary of his writing is this: It might not work, and perfect is an illusion. Act as if you can make things better by making better things, and simply begin trying. His 100 words or less say more than my distilling of his writing. But we make plans and have dreams because we have hope. Hope tied to a future we are excited about living in, while doing our part to make our corners of the world better.

We can set sail looking for a picture perfect future that can never exist exactly how we envision it. Or we can tether our hope to a belief that our actions and our choices play a part in making our world better. Even though we don’t get to choose exactly what that world looks like, we have an idea of what we are looking for and trust that we will know it when we see it. It’s easier to dock your boat on an island or a continent than on a single grain of sand.

Water is a powerful force because of its flexibility. Rising and fallings tides, adjusting in harmony with the gravitational pull of the moon. Flowing river currents rushing around rigid rocks. The rocks will alter the path water takes, but the stones are not strong enough to stop the water’s motion. Canyons are carved by the relentless movement of water. Rigid stone walls ground slowly into sand, then swept away.

And yet every January we make big resolutions. We set strict guidelines for all the ways we are going to improve ourselves beginning on the first. New year, new you style. Like the night of sleep bridging the time between December and January is transformational to our personalities in a way that the nights before couldn’t possibly be. Like we can set all new daily habits all at once and overnight.

We tend to underestimate the time it takes for us to get things done, or the time it takes for things to happen. Whether we are optimistic anywhere else in our lives, we all tend to set overly optimistic timelines. Especially when it comes our goals. Maybe it’s because we are optimistic, and maybe it’s because we are impatient. Maybe both. But we see this future happier version of ourselves, and we desperately want to just be there.

So set goals for yourself, and make resolutions if they’re your thing. Have dreams, make plans, and figure out what you’d like to contribute to the world during this season of your life. Hope in a future we each want to be a part of is a wonderful thing. Just remember that everything and every dream usually take longer than we’d like. And that the fluidity of water is probably a stronger foundation for your dreams than the rigidity of stone.