You gotta think like a boat...

Rivers, and water, are on my mind.

It began a few weeks ago when I picked up Elif Shafak's novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky. I've been reading it slowly — the kind of book that asks you to sit with it. It follows a single drop of water across centuries, falling as rain on an ancient king, as snow on a Victorian child, as holy water, as a tear. Different forms. Same substance.

"Water remembers," she writes. "It is humans who forget."

Then earlier this week I had a conversation with Sarah L Kent about dreams, and we ended up talking about flow — not the productivity kind, but the Taoist kind. The sense that there's a current already moving, and your work isn't to create it. It's to stop fighting it.

Then I glimpsed a talk from Glennon Doyle where she described the river of positive change that's already flowing — has always been flowing — and said the question isn't whether the river exists. The question is whether you get in the boat.

And then at an open mic last week, I sang Glen Hansard's "Song of Good Hope." I'd not realized how powerful the opening line is until it came out of my mouth:

"If we're gonna make it across this river alive, we need to think like a boat and go with the tide."

I keep turning these over together.

Because I think most of us sense the current. We feel it when something is working — when the work feels less like pushing and more like being carried. And we feel it when we're fighting it — exhausted, stuck, paddling upstream against something we can't name.

What I've noticed in my coaching work is that people often know which direction the river is flowing. They just don't trust it yet. Or they've forgotten.

Strengths work, at its best, is a kind of remembering.

Not learning something new. Recognizing what was already true. Seeing the patterns that have been carrying you forward your whole life — when you let them.

The river is already there. The question is whether you trust it enough to think like a boat.