Lovely thing to learn from water: Adjust yourself in every situation and in any shape, but most importantly…find your own way to flow.
Lovely thing to learn from water: Adjust yourself in every situation and in any shape, but most importantly…find your own way to flow.
Water is perhaps the single most unheralded variable in our daily lives. Without it, none of the rest happens. Your body is 60% water. 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered in water. When you look at the Earth’s mass overall, water only constitutes 0.05% of the total mass of the planet, making it a very rare substance. So when Peter Gabriel sings the lyric in the Genesis song, The Cinema Show, “there is in fact, more earth than sea,” he is accurate. Without water, life on this rock in the middle of nowhere in the universe, life would not have formed. Since the formation of the planet Earth, we have lost over 25% of the water our planet once had. Hydrogen molecules have split out of the water and made their way into outer space. So it is a finite supply that is slowly dwindling.
Water is placid. We love to see it, witness the feelings you feel standing at the water’s edge of the ocean, or lake or stream. We add it to decor to make a calming sound of water moving. Why is that a calming sound to us? Does this stem back to 9 months gestation period inside the womb?
Water brings life to all that we eat. And is the core ingredient in all that we drink.
At the same time, water can be one of the most fierce and devastating forces in nature. Torrential rain, floods, monsoons, tsunamis, glaciers, avalanches…. Take your pick… water is as damaging as it is the center of our life force. It can even extinguish fire, one of the other most ravaging elements.
It can save your life as quickly as it can kill you.
It is truly the zin/zang.
The interesting thing to me behind this science lesson is the continuous state of water. It will exist, regardless of everything.
If you contain it in a bottle. It remains. If you leave it outside, it changes form completely and evaporates to one day fall back to the ground again. If you leave it the tiniest chance to move, it will. It yields to gravity and flows wherever it wishes. It is amorphous in shape and will morph continuously in order to find its existence. If you try to block it, it just continues relentlessly to seek a path of movement when possible.
The zen perspective of our adopting the attributes of water, is perhaps one of the oldest and most wise observations. Life brings us conflict, disturbances, attempts to thwart our progress, and through all of these variables, we are expected to survive and actually thrive.
In the creation of Sizzle, I have often used the phrase that Sizzle is so adaptable, that we are like water, in that we can fill any crack in any pavement anywhere in the world through our business adaptability. I like the metaphor, and more importantly, I use it in my philosophy of how Sizzle will embrace the world of needs and desires out there. Staying amorphous and fully capable strikes me as one of the most sustainable strategies that we may employ as a company.
My stepson, Marc and his wife Karen, bought me a traditional paper calendar (as he has continuously for almost 20 years now) except this time, he found one that has my sense of humor! This month’s graphic shows a gorgeous waterfall as would be a normal calendar, except… in giant graphic wording says…. GO WITH THE FUCKING FLOW! Great comedy…. And still same message.
So the next glass of water that you enjoy, look at the fact that you are drinking from the cradle of life. The water molecules you are enjoying have gone through millions of years of continuous evolution, adaptation, and survivalist mentality. You are truly consuming the ultimate elixir of life, and it is a force to be reckoned with…. As are you.
Happy Friday!
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