Newsletter #28

Faith & Swimming

Hi there,

I’ve been spending the last few days listening to a series of lectures by Alan Watts. He gave these talks in the late 1950s. An era that feels like ancient history to me. An era that, in my mind, was so much simpler than the crazy, fast paced, volatile world we live in today.

And yet his message couldn’t be more relevant. I found it so insightful that I thought I’d share a few observations here.

The thing with us human beings is that we don’t like change much. I know I don’t. I like structure. Routines. Predictability.

And because we don’t like change we tend to spend a lot of time and effort looking for solid ground to stand on. We yearn good old fashioned stability.That stability could be in the form of a belief system that will hold up to scrutiny. A detailed plan that covers every eventuality. A version of the future we can grip onto and trust. What we’re looking for is certainty. We crave something fixed in a world that refuses to stay still. Especially with the way the world appears to be at the moment.

But Alan Watts raises a very good point for us to bear in mind as we grasp anxiously for this stability and certainty. We will never find it. Solid ground doesn’t exist because the universe isn't solid. It never was.

‘How can this be?’ I hear you say! The earth is very solid. I can stamp my feet on it. I can bang my hand on this table, it’s solid too.

It may appear that way. But let’s look at the sort of solid ground we’re actually craving. It’s more psychological than physical. We want stability because we want to feel secure. We want solid ground because we don’t want nasty surprises. We want to feel comfortable and avoid worry.

But that sort of stability just doesn’t exist. You can’t stop the world evolving. And you can’t always feel comfortable.

Look at how we experience the world. Everything comes in opposites. Joy and pain. Dark and light. Winning and losing. We tend to treat one side as good and therefore the goal of life. And the other side as the problem, the thing to be avoided or solved. With this mindset we believe that, with enough effort or the right belief system, we should be able to tip the scales of fortune permanently in our favour.

We can't. Life is a series of poles, a continuum of poles, and we live dynamically somewhere along them. You don't get north without south. You don't get summer without winter. You don't get the good years without the hard ones. That's not being pessimistic. That’s just the nature of things. And the strange, counterintuitive truth is that accepting this truth makes life so much lighter.

When you stop fighting the downs (because you’d rather not have them) and start trusting that they're part of the same cycle as the ups, something definitely shifts. You are able to bear the hard times a little more easily. Not because they painless, but because you know they're not going to last. You come to appreciate that the winters are necessary to make the spring time possible.

I’ve really seen this pattern play out in my own life. Like most people, most of my life was sprinkled with periods of fortune and misfortune. I used the think that the periods of fortune were a result of the hard work I put in. I deserved it. I earned it. And the periods of misfortune were frustrating and annoying because of other people. I hated those periods. They just weren’t fair.

But the period of my life between 2015 and 2019 was beyond disappointing and frustrating. They were years of deep pain and torment. At times I thought I would lose myself. Life was just so chaotic. Nonsensical. There was no stability or security. I felt like I was hurled into the fastest flowing river. Being tossed and battered by wave after wave.

But something amazing happened during that time. I leant to swim. I managed to find a way to get by in the most powerful of torrents. It wasn’t pleasant. But it was absolutely necessary. And I know that this isn’t a magical trait that I alone have. I know that every human being has this ability. I see it in the work I do with alcoholics and addicts. People who have been thrown about by the most horrendous of life circumstances.

The key is acceptance. Accepting the world as it is. Accepting the circumstances as they are. Accepting the feelings you are feeling. Because that’s just the way life is at the moment.

The sooner we stop trying to find that non-existent solid ground, the sooner we can start learning to swim.

Once you know you can swim, life becomes easier. You can treat every situation with a lot more levity. You can play the game of life with a lot less seriousness when you understand this. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. The point isn't to win every time. The point is to be a good sport; to lose well, to win without greed, to stay in the game, and enjoy playing.

Alan Watts talked about this in terms of wickedness — not moral wickedness, but the human tendency to impose rigid structure onto a world that is fundamentally fluid. We build our concepts and our models, our ideologies and our certainties, and we mistake them for reality. We create maps and mistake them for the territory. But they're not. They're just symbols. Every model eventually fails, because the world keeps moving and our models don't.

This is where faith comes in. But what I loved about Watts’ take on faith is that it’s not the kind that most people mean.

Faith is not having a belief so fixed, so armoured, that nothing can shake it. That's not faith. That's just blinkered rigidity looking for future certainty. And that rigid faith could be in a religion. It could be in a political movement. It could be in an economic system. Faith in any of these things is bound to fail in the long run because the universe changes in ways that no human construct can foresee or imagine.

Real faith isn't about the certainty of the destination. It's about trusting your ability to navigate whatever water you find yourself in.

Faith is knowing you can swim. It is knowing all will be well, always, because no matter what the conditions you will always be able to swim.

This sort of faith recognises that you are not a fixed, solid thing either. You are a process. A river, not a rock. And a river doesn't need solid ground. It finds a path that allows it to keep moving, to find its way around obstacles, to trust that the flow will carry it somewhere.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I’m in the process of making a decision that has no obvious right answer, no clear financial logic, no guarantee of outcome. And I noticed a nagging voice pulling me to say ‘no’ simply because no felt safer. Saying no to the world keeps me on safer ground. I would be more control. I would feel more secure.

But there is no safety. What we think is secure can disappear overnight. We only have to look at what’s happening in the middle east to see how quickly that kind of security can shift.

What doesn't shift, or at least, what you can build something on, is faith in your ability to swim. Faith in the people around you to help you swim faster, for longer, with each other. Faith that if you stay connected to what actually matters, you'll find your way through. Always.

I really don’t believe that's naive optimism. I think it's deeper than that. It's accepting that the future is genuinely unknown, that the universe is genuinely complex, and that you are genuinely capable of moving through it. Always.

We are all being carried along. Sometimes it feels like we're steering. Sometimes it feels like we’re being swept along. But we are always part of the same unfolding world. We are always in the water. We just have to keep the faith that we’re good swimmers.

Until next time,

Simon