Mastery is a River

A dear friend visited me a while ago and we had lots of catching up to do. He asked about what I'd been doing, my business, what all this is about. Then, at some point, as I tried to piece my words together, he said:

"Shadi, I get it – all the enlightenment talk, the awakening, the inner work, the remembrance, alignment. But how will it change my life? What are the benefits of going through something like that? Are you a better person now? Is your life easier? Have you been more productive? Because dude, I've got mortgages to pay, I have a family to provide for, I have deadlines to attend to. And I don't have time to chase things that won't have a measurable impact on my life."

It took me a moment to answer. The truth is: yes. My life is better than it's ever been. The practical implications of what I lived through have been immense. Every single concern he voiced – the productivity, the ease, even being a "better person" – has transformed entirely for the better. But I struggled because his questions were still about what I do, about outcomes and measurable results. And what transformed about me wasn't what I do. It was what I am. It was about the state of being I am aligned with as I do what I do.

I know that this might sound like gibberish to some, but this is what happens when we use words to describe such a profound experience. This experience is lived. It’s a state of being different than what you were before it. I can’t make him live the experience, so I need to use words as representations of the experience and try to piece together an image for him. So bear with me.

Steve Jobs, in his Stanford commencement address back in 2005, said:

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

I referenced another quote for Jobs in What Genius Actually Is, where he said:

You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

So how do you explain accessing that state of being to an agnostic without talking about outcomes? What will you call it without sounding like a lunatic? The spiritually attuned who read this will instantly know what I’m talking about, but the spiritually attuned aren’t the ones who need to read this most.

As Rumi called it, it is "a voice that doesn't use words." It is the Genius-spirit I wrote about. Your inner voice. The thing Jobs told you to trust in. Some might call it nature, or fate, a calling, or a unique purpose. They are all different names and different metaphors that point you towards that exact same force. You might not have words for it, but you can definitely feel its pull in your everyday life. So call it what you want. For this post, I'm calling it your river. And it isn’t something you build or do, but something that is revealed when you scrape away all the conditioning, the dogma, the fear, and the noise of others’ opinions. In other words, it is the fundamental force that defines who you are when everything else is stripped away. This force is the source of your deepest conviction and originality.

And mastery is simply learning to trust it, align with it, and flow with it. But to understand what that actually means, for it to feel earned instead of just some nice words for an Instagram post, we have to talk about what the river actually is.

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said:

No man steps into the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

This quote is the one of the most important keys to understanding what mastery truly is. And it’s the one all of us – especially the “productive”, the “driven” and the nostalgic – get wrong.

Most of us spend our lives at war with the river. We feel its pull in directions we don’t understand. We feel it changing beneath us and around us as it takes us with it when we desperately need our surrounding to stay the same. So we resist the change and hold our ground. But while we try to stay the same, the river doesn't stop. The current weakens us and the very act of 'holding on' changes us. We become someone in survival mode, and that person is never the same.

We then try to walk upstream back to a version of ourselves that felt more secure, more loved, or more successful. We march back to the job that once gave us certainty before the industry collapsed, or back to the relationship that colored our days before it fractured, or back to the body we had before time and stress carved new lines into it. We become convinced that our happiness lies in that exact spot upstream, so we fight the current with all what we’ve got. We work harder and sacrifice more, all in the hopes of forcing our will onto a river that’s already moved on.

And when we finally reach that spot, drained and desperate, we only find the ghost of what once was. The water is different. The banks have shifted. The rocks have moved. The creatures that once inhabited that spot aren’t there anymore. It is unrecognizable. Then we blame nostalgia for lying to us and call ourselves foolish for wanting to go back. But wanting was never the problem. The problem was swimming against an unrelenting current that was never going to let us win, with our memories of a colorful past as the bait.

So we try something else, something the advertisers will not cease to show us, from quick fixes to productivity hacks, to rigid systems or 10-year plans or pharmaceuticals, or ready-made one-size-fits-all frameworks that promise to control this wild unpredictable river of our lives. We get convinced that we can tame our river and make it behave. We can make it productive and useful.

But these ‘solutions’ to our ‘river problem’ are dams. So we mount them and measure the drops to optimize the flow. We fragment the river into manageable pieces and controlled channels. We impose a kind of discipline that looks like domination and borders on oppression. And for a while, it might work. The water pools behind the dams and everything looks calm, stable, and predictable.

But a river that doesn’t flow rots. The water stagnates and it becomes lifeless as all the colors and organisms that once gave it life begin to fade away. And beneath the surface, the pressure silently builds as the water does not give a shit about our dams even when it seems dead and still. But the dams might hold for a while and give us a chance to walk downstream. And as we walk past the last dam we've placed, instead of a flow, we find a trickle. As we walk down even farther, the trickle dries up, and we find a wasteland.

The future we thought we were securing by damming our river up is a cracked-up riverbed now and what was formerly a lively flow of water is now dead sunbaked earth. Consequently, all the control, the optimization, and the sacrifices to “build for a better future” only resulted in dust and the memory of what could’ve been. Because we can’t store life for the future, we can only live it in the now.

The irony though, are the people who walk downstream, see the drought, and use it as proof that they were right to build the dams all along. “See? There’s nothing out there anyways. It’s better to hold on to what we have. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, right?”

But here’s the thing about people, about us: we don’t see things for what they are, we see them as we are. So we can’t really blame the dull and colorless for not realizing that the drought exists because of the dams, and not despite them. In other words, the only reason the future seems so barren is because our fear of the unknown refused to let the present flow.

What’s even more problematic is that the water doesn’t give a shit about our dams. It will keep pushing and the cracks will appear. When the first dam falls, the rest stumble like dominoes. And when that happens, all the pent-up water will sweep us away with everything that we thought we’d built, from the carefully constructed life with its fragile balances, to our fragmented state of being with the rigid systems and the illusion of control we once held on to. All of it, swept up in a flood that we can no longer control.

After seeing the disappointed nostalgist who walked upstream with a mountain of expectations fall to the unrelenting current, and the lack of sustainability of the illusion of control that the dam-builder seeks, we might encounter something quieter but just as stagnant and deadly: it's what’s called an oxbow lake (I had to research this to construct this metaphor, so no shame in googling it). An oxbow lake is what happens when we get stuck in a loop. We fragment our river and live in that fragment.

The same pattern, day after day. The same relationship we keep going back to, even though we know it’s over. The same job we quit and return to. The same argument with ourselves about who we should be versus who we are. The same joint, the same glass, the same fucking poison that leaves us wanting and a little more disappointed every single time. At this point, we’re no longer part of the river but a stagnant lake. We’re a remnant of where the river used to flow, completely isolated and disconnected from the current that could carry us forward.

And the river? It won’t wait. It already moved on.

But there's one more way we relate to our river and it might be the saddest one of all: the nihilist.

We have already witnessed the inevitable doom of the nostalgist who fought the past, the control freak who fought the future, and the one stuck in a rut who fragmented the present. We have also seen the inevitability of the ocean that our river is headed towards, so we ask ourselves, "if the ultimate fate down the line is collapse and death, then why care?"

We think we’re free because we’ve stopped caring and we tell ourselves that we’re "going with the flow” and surrendering to it entirely. But we’re not flowing. We’re floating passively, unconsciously, and defenselessly like a dead weight that’s still part of the flow, but no longer alive to it. But indifference isn’t freedom, it's numbness that’s dressed up as wisdom. In refusing to care, we’re refusing to live and we’ve mistaken the inevitability of death for a reason not to taste life. That’s not why we’re here though. We're a soul wrapped in form, so we aren't dead yet. But we are battered, broke, and directionless while we wonder why letting go didn’t save us.

All four of these – swimming upstream, building dams, getting stuck in loops, floating in nihilism – are just different symptoms to the same core tragedy. As Carl Jung puts it:

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

We think we're the observer, and the river is what we're observing. We think we are the ones experiencing the flow with the river as an external force we have to conquer, control, escape, or surrender to. We think mastery is about our relationship with the river and how we navigate it, manage it, or just give up on it.

But what if the river isn’t something we’re in? What if the observer is the observed? What if we’re the river?

This changes everything.

If we’re the river, then fighting the current isn’t resistance – it’s self-destruction.

If we’re the river, then damming ourselves up isn’t discipline – it’s suffocation.

If we’re the river, then staying in the oxbow lake – the old loop, the outdated pattern – isn’t comfort. It’s cutting ourselves off from our own future.

If we’re the river, then floating through life with indifference isn’t surrender. It’s a refusal to be alive while we’re still breathing.

We’ve all heard the spiritual advice:

If you want to transform the outer world, the process must start within.

But we’ve heard the critique of that advice too:

You can’t transform your inner world without understanding the outer forces that shaped you.

So we pick one. Either we're the “inner work” monk, or the “outer work” revolutionary. But what is the river? Is it a monk or a revolutionary? Does the river attack stones to carve its canyon? Not really.

A river doesn’t declare war on the landscape and it doesn’t see the “outer” world as an enemy to be revolutionized. A river is simply a river, and just by aligning with its own current, it carves its way through canyons. Simply by being itself, it fundamentally and irreversibly transforms the “outer” world around it. It is the most powerful revolutionary force in its landscape without going out of its way to be that. But that's only half the truth.

For what is a river without its banks? The “outer forces” – the boulders and the rocks, the terrain, the conditioning, the trauma, the systems that shape us – aren’t just in our way. They are the way.

Every resistance shapes the river and without its banks, a river is not a river, but a stagnant puddle. The obstacles are what force the current to deepen and gain traction and power. The obstacles make the river what it fundamentally is.

The river carves its banks. And the banks shape the river. Our inner world shapes our surroundings, influences, and resistances. The outer world shapes what we fundamentally are: a river.

And this is where an ancient and paralyzing question collapses. It is a question that philosophers have wrestled with for millennia:

Is it free will that shapes our lives? Or are our lives predetermined by fate?

The question is presented in binary. You’re either in control, or you’re not. But if we’re a river, then the question shifts. Is a river free willed? Or is it fated?

The nihilist wasn’t wrong about fate and destiny as at some point, the river will eventually pour into an ocean, or a bigger body of water and become completely still. Gravity will ensure that this happens and a river can’t escape that fundamental force. It can’t fight gravity. But within that fate, it is the river that carves its path – around, over, through, and under the obstacles that it hasn’t chosen – through ten thousand choices. It shapes its banks through constant micro-adjustments, then it’s bound by those same banks which define its flow and make it a river.

A river’s will is not at war with its fate as they are partners. And in that partnership between free will and fate, between nature and choice, the river creates something entirely unique. It creates a path that has never existed, and will never exist again, a path that could be carved only by this river, in this landscape, flowing toward this ocean.

So ask the question one more time, but this time look at the Grand Canyon as you ask it:

What created this? Free will or fate?

The question dissolves because the answer is: the river flowed. And in that sacred partnership between inner force and outer obstacles, it became a marvel, a genius, and a destination. This is what the ancient Chinese Daoists called Wu Wei, or effortless action. It is a state of harmonious activity where your will and the world’s will – your fate – move as one. The river is the perfect manifestation of Wu Wei as it doesn’t force its way through stone. But it doesn’t surrender to the landscape either. It doesn't try to be a river. It simply is one. And in that being, it does everything a river was ever meant to do, effortlessly, and integrates with the world around it.

In that integration, both the river and the world are forever transformed.

But what is a river that fights its own fate?

It's not a river, but a broken system waiting to fall apart.

So what is mastery, then?

Mastery is recognizing that you are the river and learning to flow. It is by remembering that the obstacles, resistances and traumas you face are not in your way. They are the way.

Your pain isn’t blocking the path. It’s carving it.

Your limitations aren’t stopping you. They’re defining you.

Your failures aren’t proof that you’re broken. They’re the friction that gave you traction. When we see that truth, fragmentation ceases to be the way. When we stop fighting the current, damming it up, circling away from it, or floating through it unconsciously; we become whole within the structures that require us to stay broken. We can then move through them, understand them, and leverage them. But we can’t be owned by them.

The result is your very own Grand Canyon, your very own masterpiece that once transformed the river and the world around it, and one that still transforms anyone who bears witness into the masterpiece they hold within.

This is the transformation my friend was asking about. It isn’t about “Am I more productive?”, but “Am I more alive?” Not “Is my life easier?” but “Is my life mine?” Not “Am I a better person?” but “Am I becoming the river I was always meant to be?”

And when you answer these questions by flowing instead of measuring, you reclaim the color. We're not talking about the colorful past you were chasing upstream, but about the living color of a life that's fully yours. When you remember you're the river, you remember that life was always supposed to be multidimensional, diverse, and alive.

You were never meant to be a machine optimizing for outputs. You were always meant to be a river, carving your unique path through a landscape that will never see your equal again. It is that transformation that turns all my friend's concerns into small details in the grand scheme of your becoming, of your unique purpose, of the path that you – and only you – can carve out.

And when you're in that state of flow, even the waterfalls stop being terrifying. Have you ever seen a river afraid of the fall? It doesn't resist the drop or avoid it. It doesn't circle back upstream to stay safe either. It simply falls and then it continues deeper, faster, and more alive than ever before.

When you remember that you're the river, the things you've been avoiding, the drops you've been terrified of, and the changes you've been resisting cease to be obstacles, and become part of your very flow. And in that flow, you don't just transform what you do, you transform who you are.

In the end, this entire odyssey from the upstream struggle to the final flow is an invitation to see the single, creative act at the center of every duality – the masculine and the feminine, free will and fate, nature and choice, and every other binary choice that shapes our being. It is a final reflection on how all the pieces of our lives come together.

It begins when the ends of a duality come together –
not in fusion, but in creation.
from that act of integration,
fragmentation unfolds:
from the cells, to the selves,
to everything in between.
And every fragment becomes a world of its own,
until it remembers the whole that holds it.