🏊 TREE 558: What’s flowing?

All my life, I’ve been told that to be awesome I need to go against the flow. I get the sentiment. It’s essential to recognise that you can’t create something new and different if you are doing the same thing as everyone else. I’m also starting to think that the people who say ‘go against the flow’ fundamentally misunderstand what’s flowing.

When a weed grows through a crack in the concrete, is it going against the flow? No, the weed is the flow. It’s simply doing what plants have been doing for millions of years. The concrete is temporary blockage.

Is healthy eating going against the flow? No, the flow of life is for living things to crave good nutrition. The blockage is the rapacious ultraprocessed food industry disguising slow-acting poison as the nutrition your body craves.

Is having good physical fitness going against the flow. No our bodies are built to move. Exercise is embracing your innate love of movement and giving yourself the ability to do it more. The blockage is a society that shoves humans indoors and sits them at desks to look at screens all day because it’s more convenient and tidy that way.

Is spending your time creating new and interesting things going against the flow? No. Look at the mind-bogglingly diverse beauty of this little planet we live on. Look at the strange, different, interesting things people do. Creativity is baked into life. The blockage is the odd and rather new idea that humans are merely consumers.

The flow is a deep current of thriving life. I prefer to go with the flow – over, around and through the blockages.

In the Sonoran Desert of Southern Arizona where I grew up, there are washes. Washes are river beds that are dry most of the year. Every once in a while, especially during July and August, the monsoon season, there are rainstorms that dump a ton of water in few minutes and the washes become rivers for a little while. Do you want to go against this flow?

I’m not saying Kristin Slipp and Cole Kamen-Green definitely named their band mmeadows so they would get linked to in FFOREST, but you have to ask why else would they pick that name?

Grow slowly
Jeff