Fret not where the road will take you. Instead concentrate on the first step. That’s the hardest part and that’s what you are responsible for. Once you take that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Do not go with the flow. Be the flow.
Sometimes we cling to expectations, the further into the future the better till we get dizzy. We think: When we know what will happen in two, five or ten years, we can make the best decisions now. But the further we look into the future, the unsafer the ground gets. When you look at the smoke that arises from an incense stick you notice that the first range it takes, a few centimeters, goes right up, and then the smoke starts to curl in ever new patterns. This is an example from chaos theory which could prove that there is no possibility to calculate what would follow after the first phase of order, whether the smoke goes in this or another direction, the curls get smaller or bigger etc.
Similar is our experience with the future. What is more in distance gets fuzzy and uncertain and vanishes in unpredictability. But many have the unbroken urge to get to know what will happen then. So they consult fortune tellers and clairvoyants who should tell them what will be. Of course we should know that these prophecies are sometimes accurate and sometimes not. And we cannot know ahead which statements will be accurate and which fall among the error rate.
So we have to get involved with the mystery of future. The less we let our expectations take place and shape in our head, the easier we can accept what future has planned for us. The dominance of the linear time is an achievement of the latest centuries. In tribes who live in close contact with nature, a cyclical thinking prevails which is free of hierarchies of judgment. The spring is just different and not better than the summer, and the follow up of these seasons is one of the reliabilities.
Due to the small scale of the life circle the number of possible changes was limited. While we can chose among thousands of possibilities to spend our vacations in any degree of distance and while we can build up inner images and expectations with all those possibilities, the spacious radius for people from early stages of cultural evolution is defined by the strength of their feet and by the distance they can manage in one or at most several days to walk one way and back.
The more we have developed out of this form of living and of consciousness the more could happen in future, what blocks our plans and expectations. So we feel forced to invest more into the control of the future by trying to turn off all the risks which could linger there. And it seems that we succeed even less to control this future as by our very efforts to control it becomes even more complex.
When we dare the step from anxieties into wisdom, this means that we entrust ourselves with reality and its challenges. Reality does not allow control and does not follow our expectations. So it is advisable, to waive control and expectations as far as we manage to do so. In cases in which it is not possible we are controlled by an inner fear. When we accept this fear we can weaken its power and allow more of the trust into the flow of life.
For life flows whether we trust it or not. It takes us all along and carries us all the way whether we assume that the rudder is in our hands or we realize that the steering movements of our hands are also part of the flow. In realizing this, we are the flow.
The first step into the flow results from an inner decision. We may discover that in the deepest sense all decisions are not directed by our consciously experience of wanting but by sources beyond our recognition. Yet we can keep the “illusion” of conscious self aware decisions in order to keep up the social responsibility which is connected to the outcomes of any decision.
Sometimes we regret decisions and would prefer to reverse them as soon as we notice what went wrong. We feel overstrained with these decisions and want to avoid the consequences. But what has happened, has happened, history cannot be reversed. We should translate quarreling about the past which does not exist anymore into learning about how we can act differently now and in the future. When we trust the flow we know that we have the power to master all challenges which will come up during the journey, as every river masters the way to the ocean whatever obstacles it encounters.
The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com
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