Most of us arrive in therapy tired from hurrying. Not the visible kind of hurrying, but the inner kind: the constant sense that we should be further along, feeling differently, healed by now. We treat our own becoming like a project that is behind schedule.
Water does not do this. A river does not hurry, and yet everything gets done. It does not argue with the bend in its path or apologise for the slow sections where it pools and rests. It simply continues, and in continuing, it carves valleys.
Alan Watts spent much of his life pointing out how strange it is that we try to grip things that were only ever meant to flow: a feeling, an identity, a moment. The attempt to hold still what is moving is exhausting. A great deal of anxiety, in my experience, is exactly this: the effort of standing still against a current.
Therapy, at its best, is the practice of stepping into the current rather than bracing against it. That does not mean drifting aimlessly. It means learning to feel where the water is already going, and discovering that you can move with it and still choose your direction.
If this week feels like too much, try this: for one minute, do nothing but follow your breath the way you would watch a river. Not to fix it, not to speed it up. Just to notice that it moves on its own, and that you are allowed to move that way too.
You cannot be carried by a current you are still trying to stand still against.