“Just go with the flow, man.” It’s the battle cry of hipsters, the mantra of the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘enlightened’. Going with the flow is the cool way to live. Maybe, if you believe the hype, it’s actually the only way to approach life.
Why get worked up? Why stress? Why strive? Why struggle? Just go where life takes you. Chill out. Relax. What will be will be.
Of course what will be will be. If you let it. If you let it. But why would you do that?
Why would you allow the course of your life—the path of your adventure—to be guided by chance, taking you to some unknown destination not of your choosing?
More importantly, why deny the world the gifts and talents deep inside you that are only ever brought to the surface by your stresses, strivings and struggles?
Because that’s what you do when you ‘go with the flow’—you deny the world the opportunity to receive all that you have to offer.
Sure, there may be times when tracking with the currents of life, rather than swimming against them, is the smart choice. But those times are simply interludes—spaces where you catch your breath for what comes next.
It’s almost an irony that this paradigm of life filled with stress and struggle, rejected as futile by the hipsters, is embedded deep within the rhythms of nature that lie at the heart of the universe those very same people seek to be at one with.
Nature knows the value of not simply allowing itself to go with the flow. And nowhere is that paradigm better expressed than in the lifecycle of wild salmon.
While salmon spend long periods ‘going with the flow’ of rivers and oceans, when the time comes to make their lives count, they embrace their calling to struggle, embarking upon a treacherous adventure to their breeding grounds—directly against the flow of the current.
As they battle the current, fighting for forward momentum—driven by a single, noble goal to produce another generation—they unknowingly play a bigger part in maintaining nature’s equilibrium.
With every gasp and thrash, as they force their bodies through the water that beats them back, their scales shed vital nutrients into the waters around them. That disturbance, caused solely by their determination to go against the flow, ensures that the river’s ecosystem stays in balance.
It would surely be easier for salmon to stay put, to go with the flow of whatever river they found themselves in. But that’s exactly what they don’t do. Which is just as well, because if they didn’t struggle upstream, not only would the world be denied a most inspiring spectacle, nature itself would suffer.
Salmon somehow know that they were born for struggle. Willingly, they take their place in the adventure set out before them. And you are just like those salmon. You may not feel driven to fight the currents of life in pursuit of your destiny, but you were born for struggle; to swim against the current; to step into the adventure set out before you.
The question is, will you embrace the struggle? Because while you may prefer to drift wherever the currents of life carry you, that is not the life you were designed to live.
When you ‘go with the flow’ you don’t take the ‘cool’ choice. You abdicate your responsibility to leave your mark on the world. You deny your calling to live with intentionality.
And when you do that, not only do you miss out on what life wants to give you, the world is poorer for your choices.
