The Flowing Sutra

A thought leads to an action
An action leads to a habit
Habits become the character
Character leads to Destiny
- Buddha


Go with the flow -whether you fight it or ride it--that’s up to you- but riding it is a lot more fun. and fighting really just ends up being a waste of time. 

Old saying: “Life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you react to it.” It’s all about feeling it out, and taking the ride. the key is feeling it.

Of course you first have to learn how to act and what to do: like learning your manners, or what is socially acceptable, or how to get a good or bad response out of someone, etc. But after you figure it all out, the trick, is to completely forget about it. You have to “learn to forget”, as Jim Morrison would say. 

Now, when you learn to forget, its not as if you never learned it at all; far from it. Take the realm of the social atmosphere, for example. Compare the idea of the “social butterfly” to the idea of (and I really don't like this term) the “social retard”. As much better as it is to be the former than the later, that’s how much it helps to “learn to forget”. 

In fact all truly social butterflies will have completely forgotten social rules.

The social realm is only one aspect of life. The idea can be expanded to more. Take the contrast for instance: the realm of solitude 
-- being left to your own devices, really learning how to live with yourself (literally and figuratively), and more or less really just learning to have fun--

Eventually you may get to the point where just thinking itself can become very fun. --(Its even more fun to share ideas, and exchange experiences, with those who make good contributions to the conversation)-- At a certain point you start to abandon what you learned in school, what your teachers tell you, and start to think for yourself. Of course you’re not necessarily rejecting what you have been taught, in fact you may refer to it quite a bit. 

Really what’s going on is you are learning how to sink or swim; you’re learning how to float on your own. Like literally when you are learning to swim... first you learn the technique, and then you start to understand it, and then how to apply it. once you get good you just feel it. You don’t think about how to do the breast stroke, you just do it.

Its like Nike I guess, so you have to imagine competitive swimming. In a race, if you are thinking about anything at all, its “Faster! Go faster! I have to go faster!” not “Hm, am I kicking my legs in the right way? Are my arms moving just right?” You forget about the technique, and you just do it. You feel it, and so you go with it.

So now here is the good part. Once you learn how to go with the flow in certain aspects of life, while the going is easy, you can learn to flow, when the going gets tough. Its easy to be a social butterfly, when you make the guest list. But think about your very first week at college, or better yet, changing schools halfway through middle school, or even high school. You are new, and everybody else already has friends. So you have to stand up and make yourself known; in a good way. They are two very different situations.

In the swimming analogy: once you become a true swimmer (or the true social butterfly) the game is stepped up when you move from high school swim meets, to a college level; and then from college, to the Olympics.
So the idea is that in good times, its easy to go with the flow, sometimes is even effortless; but in the bad times, its not always exactly a walk in the park. But (!), once you graduate to the social a butterfly, or make it to the Olympics, you can go for the gold so to speak.

You can truly, and freely, just go with the flow. You can surf a massive 100 foot monster wave, and do it with style. Its really all about style.
In a figurative and literal sense, you have become an artist of life. You go to art school to learn the technique (although the saying is the worst thing an artist can do is go to art school) and afterwards, after you can stand on your own two feet, you come into your style. You put the technique behind you, because style is greater than technique! (although style is born from learning technique).

So once again, you don’t sit there and think about how to do the breast stroke, you don’t think about how to field a ground ball at second base, you don’t think about how to catch the Hail Mary to score the game winning touch down. You just do it! – Just do it – because in fact, thinking about it can really mess you up (I speak from experience).