For most of my life I’ve said I was swimming against the stream. I said it with some pride, and for a long time the pride was earned. Whatever the current was, physical, intellectual, professional, I could beat it with endurance and force of will. Push harder, last longer, refuse to quit. It got me most of what I went after.
Then it stopped working, though not all at once. The body went first, which is fair. I train as hard as I ever have and can do a fraction of what I could do at twenty. That’s arithmetic, and I’ve made my peace with it. What I couldn’t square was everything else. Work and love stalled in ways age didn’t explain: the same effort, more experience, less progress. It felt as though my own past was leaning on the oars.
What does a boat tied to the shore have to do with it?
The highest excellence is like (that of) water. The excellence of water appears in its benefiting all things, and in its occupying, without striving (to the contrary), the low place which all men dislike.
There’s a story that goes around, usually credited to a Zen teacher. I can’t find its source. It reads like something many people have told for a long time, which is my favorite kind of story. Four friends spend an evening on the water, laughing and drinking, and set off for home in a small boat. They row all night. Nobody slacks. When one tires, another takes the oars. At dawn, exhausted and proud, one says they must have come a long way. Another asks why everything looks so familiar. The rope is still tied to the shore.
The teacher’s verdict is that effort was never what they lacked. Keep rowing, but first make sure the boat is free.
I’m the man in that boat. It took me an embarrassingly long time to look over the side.
Swimming against the stream and rowing at the dock feel identical from the inside. Both are effort. The difference is that one of them moves you. I suspect that when I was young I was strong enough to tow the dock behind me and call it progress. Age didn’t add the rope. It took away the strength that hid it.
I should be careful here. Not everything that slows us down is a rope. The body’s decline is just the body, and no amount of awareness returns a twenty-year-old’s legs. I’m talking about the places where I trained as hard as ever and stayed put, the parts of life where effort was never the missing ingredient.
Where was the rope tied?
Mine was tied in childhood. My mother abandoned me, and my father ignored me so completely that I could have been furniture. I don’t say that to indict either of them. Their limits were theirs. But limits handed to a child don’t stay with the adult who owns them. A child who is abandoned and ignored goes to work. I performed for love the way I would later train for everything else, with endurance and force of will, and nothing I did got me the love, attention or acceptance I craved. Love was never something effort could buy. The habit set anyway. I began to notice how often I was drawn to people whose love felt like something to earn, and how easily I could miss the ones who might have offered it without an audition. Some of that was a trap I couldn’t see, because you can’t see the rope from the oars.
Why does self-reliance make such a good anchor?
Self-reliance was the other one, and it wore a better costume. In a professional it looks like a virtue, so nobody, including me, thought to question it. I took on everything, asked for little, and treated needing help as a small failure. It began as a survival skill. If nobody is coming, you’d better learn to manage alone, and as a child that kept me afloat. An anchor is a fine thing in a storm. I just never noticed the weather had changed, and I kept it down long after I needed it, wondering why the boat wouldn’t go anywhere.
Why do we stay when we should go?
Here is what it looked like at work. Building complicated software, I kept developers long after it was clear they weren’t delivering. Every month I’d already spent so much that leaving felt like admitting the money and time were wasted, and I called that loyalty. Limited resources made it worse, because I couldn’t easily afford to replace anyone, so I rowed harder around the problem. Everything took longer and cost more, and I was the one holding the line. The economists call what I’d already spent a sunk cost, and staying because of it a trap. I’ve since noticed that it’s an anchor in the most literal sense.
How do you look over the side?
I had no way to know any of this until I’d failed enough times, and grown curious enough, to turn my effort inward. The obvious mistake is to turn the same force inward, to make self-knowledge one more thing to conquer, another all-night row with a better-sounding destination. What has worked, to the extent anything has, is curiosity. I look at the rope the way I’d look at a strange bird, with interest and no plan to win. Some humor helps too. The stubbornness that kept me rowing is the same stubbornness that wouldn’t let me look over the side, and I’ve come to find that funny. I take that as a sign of slack in the line.
If you recognize the boat
Your rope won’t look like mine. For some people it’s a fear, for some a need for everyone’s approval, an old mistake, a relationship that has already ended, or a belief about not being good enough. Often it started as protection, which is why it’s so hard to see. Here are some ways to look over the side, gently:
- Where have I worked hard for years and stayed in place? Ignore the places where you’re simply tired. Look for the ones where the effort is real and the result never changes.
- What did this habit once protect me from? A rope usually began as a good idea. Give it credit before you question it.
- What would I do here if I had nothing to prove? Notice which part of the answer feels unfamiliar.
- Who could see this from the dock? Ropes are hard to see from the oars and easy to see from the shore. A friend, a coach, a therapist or a partner may already know. Ask.
You won’t get a clean answer on the first try, and you don’t have to. What you’re practicing is noticing, and being kind to yourself while you do it.
Can knowing ever be enough?
Thirty years ago I coached high school rowers, and I told them not to try so hard. Relax, I said. Feel the boat around you. It was good advice, and I didn’t take it myself for three decades. Knowing and implementing turn out to be different skills, and I’d only been practicing the first. So it’s probably no coincidence that I’ve ended up a student of flow at this age. Flow is what’s left when you stop rowing against something. I offer that as the shape of my own life, not as science.
Is letting go the answer?
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.
None of this makes the untying easy. Naming a rope isn’t the same as releasing it, and I can name mine and still feel it pull. “Just let go” is a lovely sentence and a poor product, and the tidy ending of the parable is exactly the kind of shortcut I’ve learned to distrust. Some ropes aren’t yours alone to cut. Some are moorings you’d be foolish to lose in bad weather. And you can spend a lifetime with one knot and still find a new one on a Tuesday.
Mine looks less like a release and more like noticing sooner. I’m still rowing. I check the line more often now, and less grimly. Some mornings I catch it within a few strokes. It used to take most of a night, and on the long version, most of a life.
Effort may not be the missing ingredient. Look over the side.