You’re a whirlpool, not a rock.

You’ve watched the bath drain. Near the end, the water starts to spin. A small whirlpool forms over the drain. It has a shape. It stays in one spot. I think at some point in every child’s life, they become fascinated by this effect. You could point at it and say, “that one.” Now here’s the strange part. The water in it is never the same water twice. Every second, new water spins in and old water goes down the drain. The whirlpool isn’t made of water. It’s made of water moving. Stop the water and the whirlpool is gone. Not broken. Gone. There was never a thing there. There was a flow.

You’re like that.

This sounds like a nice idea. It isn’t an idea. It’s what you’re made of. Right now, air is going in and out of you. Yesterday’s lunch is turning into the muscles that hold this page. Your body makes and uses up about its own weight in fuel every single day. Most of the atoms in you weren’t in you a year ago. You keep the shape. You don’t keep the stuff.

A rock is the opposite. A rock keeps its stuff. A rock can sit in a field for a thousand years, and nothing has to happen. You can’t sit still for ten minutes without breathing. Things that are alive are flows, not rocks. The flow is what keeps you here. That’s a feature inherent in this world.

Three things follow from this. They’ll come up in every letter after this one.

FFirst, you need the flow. Rest is good. Stopping is not. The way to stay alive and strong is to keep things moving through you.

When you feel stuck, the question is never “what’s wrong with me?” The question is “what stopped flowing?” That’s usually an answerable question.

SSecond, trouble is just more water. A whirlpool gets bigger when more water comes through it. A rock just gets hit. When something hard happens to you, you get to choose which one to be. You can let it hit you and chip you. Or you can let it move through you and come out the other side bigger. Not every time of course, some things just hit too hard. But far more often than you’d think, the thing you’re afraid of is just more water.

TThird, you’re not sealed off. Nothing about you is. The whirlpool is made of the whole tub, not just the bit near the drain. That’s why what you eat, who you spend time with, and what you read all end up as part of you. It’s also why most of your limits aren’t walls. They’re places the flow hasn’t reached yet. “I can’t” almost always means “I haven’t.”