Flow, don't fight (Part 2)
On mailboxes, cold showers, and what flows when you stop resisting.
The bloody mailbox keeps falling.
“You are not weak just because your heart feels so heavy.”
— Andrea Gibson, awarded Poet Laureate of Colorado in 2023
I cried watching a documentary about two poets, one living with terminal cancer. The poems held my heart tenderly, long enough to stay with it: the fight for one more morning next to the person you love.
Fixing the mailbox for Andrea Gibson was a way of saying:
I still live here. I still expect letters to arrive. I still want tomorrow.
I stood under the water, still carrying the mailbox in my head.
Cold Jesus.
The water didn't care about my metaphors.
I turned the tap to warm. I slowed down.
The reverberant sound water makes when it splashes onto your body. The squeaky sound of my foot on the bathroom floor. Underneath it all was the gentle percussion of water finding the drain.
Am I a waterfall? Or the mailbox?
Before the shower, I'd been staring at a blank page for forty minutes.
Now I just listened.
Water splashes onto me, flowing through me, draining below me. Little rivers running down my arms and finding the plughole.
And I realised: Oh dayum, I am now in a flow state.
So, obviously, I decided to ruin it. I turned the tap to cold blast.
Immediately, my body fought back. My chest tightened. My shoulders lifted. My breath shortened. Every exposed part of me voted to cut the experiment short.
I would like a cup of tea in the shower now. Please.
Writing is like this too. The resistance reaches before words arrive.
But this time I stayed. I let myself feel the sharpness pierce my skin. It kind of got better, but was still bloody painful. The pain became more precise. I could feel exactly where it was sharpest. Where my body shouted the most, I sent a soft breath.
My body was buzzing. Which is a strange thing to feel on a Monday morning before writing a single sentence. I made it sound easy, as if flow state is like a river moving effortlessly towards the sea. And sometimes it is. But often flow begins somewhere as mundane as a mailbox.
I turned the water back to warm and stood there, quietly pleased with myself, the way you are when a metaphor arrives fully formed and you briefly forget that insight is not the same thing as practice.
Another realisation arrived.
This one was less convenient:
This is a capacity I have to build it (not think about building it or write about building it).
So I turned the cold water back on.
Again.
This time I could feel the fight rise before it became the whole story. I gasped. Panic first, then something closer to exhilaration. I still complained internally in a nagging voice. But I didn't leave. I was the waterfall, the mailbox, and the grand canyon all at once.
Now I am writing my final words for you:
Your mailbox will keep falling. You will keep fixing it.
Some days you'll arrive as a river. Some days you'll arrive screaming at the cold shower.
The mantra is simple.
Send a gentle breath to the space around your heart, and soften, whether you’re flowing or fighting.
“A doctor once told me I feel too much. I said, so does god. that’s why you can see the grand canyon from the moon.” ― Andrea Gibson
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