Going With The Flow

I did a flyer. Just left the house and went somewhere. Landed in Vietnam, non-tourist city of Hai Phong. Needed to keep my writer’s soul alive and I’ll get myself a notebook today and this week wander about, going with the flow.

I took a motorcycle taxi from the airport, a beautiful old man in need of money. Gorgeous nails. He couldn’t read a map and we got lost, so I jumped out at the traffic circle, in the video above.

I'm astounded by the flow of things here in the old city. The flow of chaos everywhere around my downtown hotel. The video of the traffic circle shows pedestrians, motorcycles, scooters, cars all just proceeding naturally without any rules, no obstructions or accidents. As beautiful to my soul as Beethoven or Sonnet 18.

Things conspire inside you, when you just let them digest, rest and be. I mean, I’ve been thinking a lot about language learning and how research shows it is such a completely implicit process. Despite how so many learn it explicitly in classrooms through direct instruction, rules, do this, don’t say that teachingism. And here for me is the perfect metaphor.

We, us, you - we get in the way of the natural gifts and processes we are given. The Tao (and I will return for subscribers to finish that series). We need to get out of the way. Stop being our own worst enemies.

You see, when Beethoven composed or Shakespeare wrote, notes and words “came” to them. They were not created. They entered into the growth or creation, the morphic resonance of being and thus “out of the way”, what was meant, arrived. Lieh Tze said, “the problem isn’t being able to stand still, the difficulty is to walk without touching the ground.’ Why? Well, we get in the way. But should you arrive at satori, you are “out of body” and you flow with it. You and space are one, weightless.

To be silent the whole day, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. ~Henry Miller

The traffic circle is a metaphor asking us to “be” in the world. It is asking us to reject much of our self-consciousness, a feature, our awareness of ourselves that is the fentanyl of modern civilization. Dorian Gray, Midas, the mirror, the celebrity, self-help books, social media, advertising, religion, politics and on and on and me and me and me … It’s a killer, it has killed more than any wars. It’s deadened the soul, the constant voice in our heads, our constant awareness that makes us go crazy, ignore the pain and suffering of this world and jump off of bridges in the middle of nowhere.

I think of how a flower just grows. I think of how a school of fish flows along so easily. I think of how we all can just ride the wind if we simply learn to exist with each other and turn off the ghost in our machine.

Ok, got to get some breakfast. Buy that notebook and fill it with some thoughts. Like always, I will just wander, letting syncronicity do its thing for me. Forgetting about advantage or disadvantage, the dinner bell of our consciousness. Below, I’ll leave you with a story, a zen story that might make sense of just being there and forgetting our yardsticks of useless measuring of value.

One day, a man won a nice sum of money in the lottery. All the neighbors gathered and said, “Wow”, “How lucky.” The man said, “Maybe”.

The man bought a motorcycle for his son so he could work as a delivery man. The first day on the job, his son had a terrible accident and was in the hospital. All the neighbors visited the man and said, “So sad.” “How unfortunate.” The old man said, “Maybe.”

While healing in the hospital, the man’s son was examined and they discovered cancer. But it was in time and treatable. All the neighbors visited the man and said, “How fortunate!” The old man said, “Maybe”.

The man’s son eventually came home and needed a lot of care. It took all the man’s lottery winnings and more to pay for his medicine and care. The neighbors would visit and say, “Life is so hard.” “It’s so unfair for you.” The old man said, “Maybe.”