Are we in our riverbed?
I have a month worth of notes accumulated in my phone under “Substack Jan”. I clearly had planned to turn them into something readable and shareable earlier than in February and I have to accept that I do things slowly - except maybe talking and thinking.
So let me start with how I feel about people who seem to do everything like clockwork. They write and publish everyday or every week. Their consistency “seems” unshakeable, their time so well delimited and their imagination bottomless. About these people, I’d like to report that I feel nothing. And this would be the biggest lie. Instead, I’d like to say that I am a therapist, therefore I don’t compare myself to others because I know how pointless that is. Just another lie.
On the matter of time, I know myself and I work with that. In other words, I am okay with my idiosyncrasies in my relationship with time. No big deal.
On the comparison front, it can hardly ever be a fair comparison. In life even when we think we compare apples with apples, most likely we’re not. Not a single person has the same soul, the same soul plan or soul contract if you’d prefer, no one has the same karma, the same memories nor the same place in this universe - in which we all have one by the way. We’re not the same and we’re not meant to be, however we can inspire each other.
Among the concepts proposed by Lacy Phillips from To Be Magnetic (series of online workshops and a podcast episodes to help people manifest what they want), a recurring notion is the one of “expanders”. In its simplest form, an expander is someone who inspires us and helps us believe that what we desire is possible, attainable. The more parallels, the better. Not to compare, but to show and prove to us the possibility.
I recently heard one of the best examples of this in the French podcast Envol where Amélie Challéat, whose daughter Shéérazade was born extremely prematurely at only 26 weeks and weighed just 800g, speaks about the many times the medical team in the intensive care unit had to revive her baby. Each time, she and her husband were asked to leave Shéérazade while the doctors were intervening attempting to save her life. This meant the parents had to walk out of the room not knowing if their daughter was going to survive and if they’d see her again. Amélie explains that in the abyss of despair and darkness where she no longer believed in much of anything, on the walls of the waiting room, there was a board with the names of babies who had been intubated at 500g, 600g and next to it, photos of these babies at 3-4 years old. This gave Amélie the hope to believe and tell herself: “he did it, she did it, so maybe we can do it too, maybe all three of us can go home”. Shéérazade is now 2.5 years old and Amélie has been sharing their journey extensively on social media. She says: “By telling it, by sharing it, there will be someone, somewhere, in a corridor of an intensive care unit who needs to hear this story and it will help them. And if sharing the story helps just one person, we've won”. It illustrates beautifully the concept of “being expanded” into believing, becoming one day an “expander” for someone else, and because we don’t know whom, when and where, we may as well generously share.
The last part of the last sentence has its own importance because some of us are always hesitant to share or to believe that we have anything relevant or interesting to say, let alone the skills or talent to do so properly.
Sometimes it takes to simply do it, take the leap and see what happens. Especially when the stakes are low.
I am saying this for two reasons. The first is that I am one of those people; it takes tremendous effort to, as it is fashionable to say, ‘put myself out there’. Secondly, I had an experience of having to do just that a week ago, in person, and to my surprise, the feedback was more (read better) than what I could have hoped for.
But here is the thing, in life we need to make our move first, then life comes and meets us there. It works in our favour this way, not the other way around. Life is movement, even when it’s subtle. When the movement slows right down, which happens, even then what we do while we’re waiting is important. It’s in our interest not to be passive. We of course have agency in this and therefore a personal responsibility to bear the consequences of our actions or lack of. I spent many years following the spiritual teaching of a woman who often said: “We take one step towards the Divine, the Divine takes a thousand steps towards us”. The point remains the same: we have to move first. And some actions, some steps, only we can take them.
From here I want to briefly segue into the topic of ‘bypassing’. There are things we have to face, to take on, to confront, to get close with, to get real about. Things we’d rather not. Comes with them the temptation to shortcut, to take a different road, even if it takes us away from our path, for as long as it doesn’t cross with this very thing we’re trying so hard to avoid. It’s pointless, life will find us wherever we are. We all face challenges, discomfort and we most definitely are all tested on a regular basis. The more we dodge these tests, the reality of our lives, the consequences of our choices, the harder it gets.
Similarly, life awaits us somewhere, and even though the steps towards it might be scary and bumpy, the avoidance strategy isn’t recommended. The French philosopher Julia De Funès explains how the “Know Yourself” of Socrates has often been misinterpreted. What it meant was that we’re to find our place in the universe, in the cosmos and that's what a successful “Greek life” was all about: finding our “topos”, our place. So it’s an opening to the outside world, not a narcissistic analysis of our ego and small self.
Pursuing with the debunking of “knowing yourself”, I would warn against the idea that it should be easy, that things and situations in your life should “flow” otherwise “it’s not for you”. That only appeals to lazy egos and wannabes in the gangrened self help industry. We need the courage of our desires, convictions and our values. We need to work at it, to dedicate ourselves to it, to invest in it.
In the last two years my husband and I turned our lives around 180 degrees, a real start from scratch. I had two conversations in the same week with two different women about this and to some of their remarks I found myself saying this: “we created our luck”. It didn’t fall in our laps. We worked at it, we researched, we hired some help, we had setbacks, we had surprises, some good ones, some not, we followed prompts, we listened to our intuition, we pitbulled it and didn’t let go when it felt right to hold on. It’s a ride. It’s life. It means ups and downs. Linearity in this instance is a lie, it doesn’t exist.
When the books say, it’s not the end results that matters, it's the journey. What they mean beyond being cheesy and annoying is that there is no end result without a journey and as far as you’re personally concerned and involved in the ‘journey’, it never feels like an ending anyway. When do you ever feel like you’ve arrived? You don’t really. No one does. You bought the house. Guess what, you’re going to want to redo the painting. And then something else. You can’t help it, it’s human nature. In the same way, the sum of your experience throughout your journey feeds and expands (or contracts) your consciousness which in itself is infinite. There will always be room for more.
So what? A few things in fact. We all have our mountain to climb. We all have areas of life where it comes easier to us than others. This doesn’t mean quit the harder parts. Just keep checking that you’ve not gone off path.
Imagine you’re a river, you know that you have to keep moving and that your place is in your riverbed, that’s where you flow, where you’re happy, and depending on the seasons and cycles, you might be higher, stronger, or lower, dryer but what matters is that you don’t let anyone or anything take you away from your riverbed. Because that’s your place.
Thank you for reading.
Mahé