Paddling Upstream

Dear friend,

Do you ever get the feeling like you’re paddling pretty intently but somehow—if a canoe is a metaphor you can connect to—it’s not moving anywhere?

The feeling of paddling against the stream.
What then would it mean to turn around and flow with the current?

When I hear myself asking a question like that, the answer comes: to trust more in life, and to deepen my faith in the divine. So much worry and concern comes from feeling like I must rely on my own—or my false self’s—cleverness. Maybe that’s sensible. Maybe not.

I was talking with a client today and shared a story about a time when there was some kind of divine intervention that got me out of a potential hot mess.

Me and my brother were handling the sale of our parent’s home and, as is often the case in a situation like this, we were both going through our own grieving process, each in our own way. You’ve so many forms to fill in and hoops to jump through, at a time when the axis of your world has tilted. There are tidal waves of confusion and earth tremors. Sometimes your pen slips.

I’d filled in some details about the house and sent off the forms, ignoring the nagging feeling that I’d fudged something—only to realise later, when I was feeling more resourced, that I’d given what could be considered misleading information.

When I saw my mistake, I got that molten-lead-in-the-stomach feeling. The hot and cold sweats. Then the estate agents handling the sale rang me with an embarrassed apology. They couldn’t work out how it had happened—they’d had a clerk go round all of their branches looking for it—but they’d lost the very sheet that I’d filled in incorrectly.

They had all the other papers. Just that one troublesome sheet was missing.

I was, of course, incredibly understanding and more than happy to submit a corrected version.

I fancied I could hear Clarence the angel from It’s a Wonderful Life chuckling away to himself.

So maybe with all of the upheaval we’re seeing around us, we can also afford to give ourselves some respite. It is a wonderful world, and more mysterious than we can imagine.

We are loved. We are held. Help is available.

Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey