Tubing through Life
When I lived in Oregon, I went tubing once on the McKenzie River which has both calm and choppy parts. It is wide enough to hold both simultaneously as you float down the river. This was the first time I’d tubed, and I was quite afraid of the choppy bits, so I very much wished to avoid them. At one point, I saw a choice ahead of me: on one side of the river, there was a scary, choppy stretch with low-lying branches, and on the other, a smooth and gentle stretch. Panicking, I stared at the scary part while paddling furiously to get away from it. The more I stared and floundered, the faster I headed toward it. When I redirected my gaze to the place I wanted to be, it seemed that the tube just naturally headed that way, and it became an effortless ride to the gentle part of the river. The lesson for me was to focus where I wanted to be headed, rather than staring and fighting the place I wanted to avoid.
In life, there are many ways in which we try to avoid and fight things that seem overpowering, only to discover that the avoidance brings us closer to, rather than further from what we are trying to avoid. Perhaps we tell ourselves that we are going to stop eating compulsively, or we are not going to react angrily when someone triggers us, or we are not going to overspend our money. Then it seems like the more we try not to, the more we really want to do it, until we can’t help it, and we binge, we strike out at someone, or we blindly splurge.
Just as in the river, avoidance is much harder to accomplish than having a focus on where you actually want to be. In other words, it is much harder for humans not to do something than it is for us to do something. This is a similar concept to the child who hollers “I WILL NOT FALL DOWN!” in hopes that saying so makes it true, but who would likely fall anyway. Instead of trying to avoid doing those things we’d rather not do, we can instead decide that we will try to notice our feelings and our physical sensations before, during, and after we do those things. The goal changes from avoiding a behavior, to staying connected with ourselves during that behavior. That connection will give us an awareness that can help us to move in our desired direction gently and effortlessly.