Life is a Forward Moving Force
When I was about 12-years-old, I got to see Zig Ziglar speak. Up until Zig, the only people I had seen standing on a stage talking were preachers. Zig is a motivational speaker. He’s funny and compelling. I wanted to grow up and do that.
The desire to become a motivational speaker persisted through college. I majored in psychology because I wanted to understand how people think. I started working on self-help book ideas around the time I fell in love with the Internet and learned HTML. The Internet won out over my dream to be a pop-psychology guru, but my first book was going to start with these two sentences:
Life is a forward moving force. There’s little to be gained by wallowing in the negative aspects of your past.
I was inspired by Milton Erickson in college. He demonstrated that big changes where accomplished when people made small changes in their lives. Start doing something you wouldn’t ordinarily do and you’ll start to notice that everything else in your life will shift to accommodate the small change. Life is a forward moving force is a thought that came to me after taking a completely out-of-character kayak trip down the Buffalo National River in Arkansas.
Luria/Cali and I planned like crazy for the trip. We packed enough dried food and provisions to last a month. We didn’t have much money, so we bought inflatable kayaks and plastic paddles. My grandmother dropped us off on a river bank and we floated away. Before we were out of my grandmother’s sight, our paddles broke and the water pushed us right into a pile of brush where there were several water moccasins coiled up getting some sun. We used our hands and broken paddles to escape from the snakes and back into the flow of the river.
It took us about three days to get to a place where we could get out of the river and walk to a phone. We had to adapt to our circumstances in order to keep the boat moving. We made our way with broken paddles, our hands, and the natural flow of the river. The river was a moving force and nothing we could do would stop it. It pushed us into the snakes and we had to deal with that. We had to cope with whatever challenges the river threw our way and it didn’t matter that our tools were inadequate. We had to adapt.
Life is a forward moving force just like a river. Sometimes it’s relaxing and fun and just kind of carries us along. Sometimes the current is overwhelming and we have to struggle to get back on track. It may feel like changes we need to make are more than we can handle, but sometimes little changes can bring about radical transformation.
Our trip down the river changed my life in a lot of ways. It made me stronger, more outgoing and more willing to take risks. It was transformational because it was the kind of thing I would never choose to do. It’s good to remember the snakes and broken paddles were only a small part of the journey. It’s even better to remember how we made it through.
One Response to “Life is a Forward Moving Force”
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Keep writing Neal.. I found that profound on many levels. You do have a gift for motivational writing. Except for the snakes “just say’n”