Many years ago a very thirsty traveler stumbled upon a stream. After the traveler finished drinking, he shouted at the water: “I am finished drinking now, you may stop flowing,” but of course the water kept flowing, so the man became angry and shouted even louder, “I already told you that I’ve finished drinking – I said to stop flowing!” And just then a passer-by laughed at the man and said, “What a great fool you are! The water will not stop flowing just because you ask it to!” And he laughed at the foolish traveler and sent him on his way.
Every time we expect that temptations will somehow just magically disappear or go away when we don’t want them anymore, we are like the foolish man who shouted at the water to stop flowing simply because he had had his fill. How many times have we all tried to move beyond something, get over someone, or break the bonds of an addiction, only to get angry when the same images that hooked us return? I guess it’s easier for us to demand that the things that tempt us just go away, rather than facing them head on.
But temptations do not just go away. The world is what the world is; it is our job to see it for what it is and learn to navigate our way through it. That’s not always easy, but it is possible. Even if we do not just “shout at the metaphorical water,” and we actually do something to try to stop it from flowing – like build a dam – eventually, if left unattended, the water will cause a break. Images of obsession or addiction will always emerge, return, and lurk somewhere along our way – until we find the courage to deal with what the images represent.
As a counselor educator, I frequently taught my students to not tell their clients to “just ignore” things. The brain does not simply, “just ignore things;” some things move to the foreground, others to the background – therefore, if something is present for us, and we choose not to deal with it, it becomes the-thing-that-gets-shoved-deep-in-our-psyches, only to reappear later, at a time we most likely were not expecting.
Temptations abound; but so does our courage to face what we need to face. The water will always run, always flow… and so, as Joseph Campbell tells us Heinrich Zimmer once said, “The mystic swims in the sea of chaos that the schizophrenic drowns in.” Instead of looking at temptations as “wrong” or “bad,” why not view them as a part of the world… as an opportunity to practice our inner strength? If viewed as opportunities, we can stop shouting at the water, jump in, and let go to swim with our temptations – face them every step of the way – and deal with them head on.