What Would Water Do?
Lessons I’ve been learning from water
Water is essential to life. It is no surprise, then, that water has held a spiritual and divine significance for many ancient civilisations and indigenous communities around the world. However, today, the spiritual and sacred value of water has begun to clash with the perception of water as merely a resource at the disposal of societies to be used for economic development.
We have learnt that life as we know it would not exist if it wasn't for water. But have we ever thought of water beyond the means it provides us for our survival? Have we asked ourselves what we can learn from it?
Water has many profound qualities but there is one chief characteristic that has always stood out for me: water is formless. And because it is formless, it is adaptable. It can become whatever it wants to adjust to any given situation at hand. Now this may not seem like the most valuable trait to have until we understand what it really means to be formless.
A formless mind is capable of ever expansive, ceaseless growth. I think this is why I have always loved and been endlessly fascinated by children. You see, it is their mind that was capturing my attention, not the things they were doing or their peculiar ways of doing them. Their minds are fresh, innocent, unconditioned and unrestricted by the world around them. Nothing is outside the realm of possibility, nothing but potential lies in front of them. They see the world as a playground, literally and figuratively, doing nothing but learning from it every single moment of every single day and adapting and moulding themselves around it. This open-mindedness blesses them with exponential growth. As they age, however, their minds tend to compress, become rigid, and so the learning stops. They are now bounded, limited and do everything but adapt.
So, as grown ups, we approach everything in life with a rigid and fixed mind. We take form and shape everywhere we go. We put up barriers and with those come limitations. Change, big or small, is at the very least extremely uncomfortable if not utterly terrifying to us. We like to keep things as they are and play it safe at all times. It is why we fight with all our might to go back to old ways when things start to shake up. But what good has staying the same and clinging on to things ever done for us? Like Tony Robbins once said -
“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”
It is time to ask: what has water got to do with all of this? The key to learning from water and its quality to adapt is to, like I was saying earlier, understand the concept of formlessness. The reason why water does not fight or resist when it is introduced to a new environment and changes to fit perfectly into its new home is because of a standout quality: it does not have a form of its own. There is no ‘one’ form of water, it simply assumes the form of what it encounters on its journey. In that sense, it is absolutely formless. Because if it had a form, it would be in a state of identification with what it perceives — it would identify itself as “I am this.” It would begin to initiate the feeling of — “I am this and therefore I cannot be that. I am this body. I am this mind. I am this personality. I am this feeling. I am this emotion. I am this. I am that.” Simply put, it is constantly ‘becoming’, it is never just ‘being’.
In talking about emulating water and learning to be like it, we must evaluate how to let go of the forms and shapes we have created for and of ourselves. In other words, we must ask ourselves — how do we begin to shed the identity we have so carefully curated for ourselves? It is easy to mistake identity with personality — it is important to have a personality and a strong sense of self but it is not so important to be attached and fixated on one and hence, identify with that ‘one’. It is crucial and liberating to then realise that like water, our defining aspect as human beings is that we are constantly changing and have been built to possess the ability to adapt to the ever-changing.
If we learn to be like water, we can open doors to growth and grow to the size of an ocean. And only an oceanic mind can truly resolve conflicts because it can absorb all conflicts into itself and then dilute them without ever being touched by them. An oceanic mind, like the ocean, is virtuous because no matter what it touches, it adapts to every situation and rises above it while retaining its purity, its life giving quality.
An excerpt worth mentioning from verse #8 of the book ‘Tao Te Ching’ that was so immensely enlightening and intensely moving the first time I read it and one that casts a different light on water:
“The supreme goodness is like water.
It benefits all things without contention.
In dwelling, it stays grounded.
In being, it flows to depths.
In expression, it is honest.
In confrontation, it stays gentle.
In governance, it does not control.
In action, it aligns to timing.
It is content with its nature,
and therefore, cannot be faulted.”
-Tao Te Ching
And so, dear friends, be like water. And if you ever feel conflicted in any situation or feel stuck in life, ask yourself this simple question -
What would water do?