Go with the flow and what it really means
Over the course of this rather transformative summer, I got an amazing opportunity. In that little window where the pandemic seemed to be dying down and before Delta really started rearing her ugly head, I got the chance to go to Hawaii with three of my oldest friends. It’s something we’ve been talking about for close to a decade and, well, life has had a lot of messages about not putting things off lately.
On my first day there, my friend who has called the island home for the last 7 years took me to the market near her house and I got to meet several locals who have been a big part of her life during her time there. One shop owner was a lovely, talkative man who said “go with the flow” every few sentences. He used it almost like punctuation, summing up any story or advice with “go with the flow.”
I’ve hated that expression most of my life. Mainely I think I’ve heard the expression used in a way that basically means “shut up and put up” and I am very much not wired that way. But something about this lovely man’s insistence, coupled with the foggy suggestibility of jet lag, made me pause and start to look at it in a different way.
Like many other things in Hawaii, the expression is tied to the ocean. If you get caught in a rip tide and you try to swim against it, you are going to wear yourself out and you will still get carried out to sea. But if you swim with the current, and keep your eye on the shore, you can deal with what is happening in a way that will get you back to safe waters. It means don’t panic, it means breathe, it means stay in the moment and make it what you can.
“Go with the flow” became my mantra for the trip and I really came to see it as synonymous with “be present with what is happening now.” We were a big group which included one of my friends 4 awesome kiddos who are all teens and pre-teens. It wasn’t always easy, but eventually it became second nature to lean into the moment and breathe when things started going in a different direction than expected. It allowed for so much more possibility. Long waits for lunch became moments to pause and catch up, difficulties adjusting to the time change made it easy to get up and watch the sunrise, a torn snorkel mask sending us back to the boat early resulted in a meeting with a tiny octopus, an unexpectedly rained out sunset excursion became swimming in the rain in a Hawaiian sunset.
On our last full day in Hawaii, 6 of us decided to take a quick trip to the beach “for an hour or so.” It turned out that our beach was down a 2.5 mile hike. Through a rainforest. With upwards of two inches of mud on the path. And all of us were wearing Oofos (for the uninitiated, Oofos are super comfy rubber shoes, flip flops in this case, that become the most slippery surface known to man kind in the mud.)
Most of us chose to do the hike barefoot and we were mud to the knees and rather damp from a rain shower before long. It would have been so easy to get cranky (some of us may have succumbed to that a bit) but then we would have missed so much: the bright orange autograph tree fruit hanging from the jungle foliage and dropping around our feet, the gorgeous vine covered lava tubes appearing out of the undergrowth, the amazing sounds of the forest.
At one point, we had to pause to wait for some of our group to catch up and we stopped under the reach of a particularly majestic banyan tree. There was really no place to sit and morale was starting to hit a bit of a low point. I turned to our youngest group member. “Wanna climb this banyan tree with me?” His eyes lit up and ultimately three of us clambered up the gorgeous trunk to wait for our friends. Climbing a banyan tree in the middle of a rainforest is something you don’t even realize is on your bucket list until you do it.
The rest of the hike was still a bit of a slog, but we came out on an absolutely gorgeous beach with very few people, warm sandy water, and a massive sea turtle basking in the sun. We definitely didn’t want to leave for the hike back out, but we made it back, tired and muddy, and with a great story to tell. That unexpected hike is my favorite memory from the whole trip.
I’ll confess that going with the flow is much easier on vacation than it is in “real” life where deadlines and outcomes are higher stake. It’s still something I need to remind myself to practice…a lot. But at least I get what it means now. I’m never going to be the put up and shut up type, but I’m definitely learning to lean in to where life takes me and find the beauty in the moment.
Your writing is profound, evocative, and entertaining. Keep it up! THANK YOU!