Ongrowing - Learning from Water

How we can derive strength from softness and flexibility

After a 6-month hiatus, Ongrowing is back! Thank you all for your patience; I honestly didn’t know when I would be ready to write again and was also quite scared of not returning at all. I don’t have a great track record when it comes to solo projects, and writing about the hard, vulnerable stuff… not the easiest. However, all the “New free subscription for Ongrowing!” emails kept coming in, and they reminded me that there are readers out there who are eager to read more. So, thank you and hello to the many new faces here! Let me take a quick moment to re-introduce myself and Ongrowing.

Hi all! My name is Fair 👋 I’m a product of many cultures in this world — primarily Thai, (Hakka) Chinese, British, American — but my worldview has been expanded and shifted through many travels and interactions with people from all over the world.

Me smiling when the rain stopped in Porto, Portugal 🇵🇹

My dream is to see a more just, loving, kind, and fair world, and I believe our current systems are not conducive to creating that. Naturally, I’m curious about finding new ways we can design and build a healthier environment (inner and outer) that can support us in being our whole, authentic selves. Because I believe all great changes start at the individual level, I seek to understand how humans think and feel and how that affects their interactions with others. I dive into the fields of psychology, anthropology, history, biology, medicine, and spirituality to find potential answers and solutions.

Ongrowing serves as a platform where I can connect and share with you the collection of my learnings from the aforementioned quest. Ongrowing combines the words ongoing and growing because I believe that we, humans, are ever-evolving. I hope that, with each story and each prompt, we can live flourishing lives in a just, loving, kind, and fair world.

Some quick personal updates before I go into today’s story:

• I was terminated from my full-time job a few months ago due to the company’s economical issues, and it’s been one of the greatest “closed doors” I’ve experienced. It has given me time to re-evaluate what I truly want to do and how I want to spend my time

• I decided to not join any company or organization full-time soon, and independently pursue my many initiatives instead. My worst fear is burning my savings account to nil, but I have to constantly remind and trust myself that I wouldn’t let that happen

• Val, who I met via the Substack network, kindly invited me to write a guest post for her publication! In the post, titled “To believe, or not to believe”, I explored my relationship with religion. You can give it a read on Val Thinks here

• I went on a world tour and visited five countries on two different trips: Turkey, Georgia, Spain, Andorra, and Portugal. I’m excited to weave in the beautiful sceneries and sights into my writings and share them with you

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Today’s Story

I've always been drawn to bodies of water. The hotel’s pool, Lake Tahoe, the Andaman ocean, the Bosphorus strait (pictured below). You can easily find me floating, swimming, diving, enjoying myself on a boat, or attempting to surf in one of these places.

The Golden Horn bridge in Istanbul, Turkey. It is located in the primary inlet of the Bosphorus.

There's this gleaming quality about water that seems so calming yet so mystic and foreign. In nature, water is always flowing. Confident and steady, water seems to always know which direction to head to. It can be forceful and gentle depending on its surroundings. Lao Tzu, an ancient Chinese philosopher who wrote the influential Tao Te Ching, once said:

“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.”

In our modern day society, we look up to those who are strong and forceful. “Only the strongest survive”, they say. We admire those who are physically strong, who are relentless, who are tough, and we assume that strength only comes from brute force.

The contrary, though, can be learned from water. Imagine strength that comes from being fluid, soft, and yielding. When we stop resisting the present and allow it to unfold, we can actually focus on our flow. When we follow the different streams that life provides to us, we may end up in places we don’t even dare dream of. When we soften, we can become more kind and loving to ourselves and those around us.

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The (Writing) Prompt

Think about areas or situations in your life where you are inflexible and are currently resisting. It may be that you’re frustrated at a change that has recently occurred in your life or you’re angry at your partner/family member/co-worker who disagreed with you. Why are you feeling that way? How may you be more fluid, soft, and yielding in your response?

I leave you with a quote from the book “Why We Swim”, which perfectly encapsulates my feeling when I’m in the water.

"Water is in a forever state of flux. To swim is to witness metamorphosis, in our environment, in ourselves. To swim is to accept all the myriad conditions of life.” - Bonnie Tsui

Take good care,

Fair