Water can't flow upstream

On time, intuition, and learning not to swim against yourself

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how quickly the year seems to move once it’s already in motion, about how January barely has time to settle before February arrives with its quiet insistence that you should probably be more oriented by now.

How is it already February? It feels like the new year just started…yesterday?

I turned 31 last week. The build up to my birthday came with that familiar, low-grade pressure that tends to accompany a birthday in adulthood: what will the plans be, how will I celebrate, will there be a restaurant booking, or a ‘braai’, or night out to celebrate? I kind of avoided the question because I was deep in my own life-things, but a week before my birthday realized I should probably figure something out, while noticing that none of the obvious options quite fit the way I actually felt.

I did want to do something, I just had a lot going on, felt a bit overwhelmed, a bit out of sync, and vaguely surprised that 2026 had arrived with such momentum when I was still finishing thoughts from the year before.

Go Where the Energy Flows

At work, there’s a phrase I’ve come back to often, especially when people feel stuck or overextended or unsure of their next move or project.

Go where the energy flows.

It’s pretty simple but it’s always been great advice in my opinion: to notice the difference between work that asks something of you but gives something back, and work that feels like friction at every step, where progress only comes from pushing harder and harder against yourself.

Energy, I’ve learned, is a kind of signal. The things that pull at your attention without needing to be justified often know something your rational brain hasn’t caught up with yet.

The mistake we make is assuming that resistance is virtuous, that difficulty automatically means importance, or that if something feels heavy it must be worth carrying. Sometimes it’s true. Often it isn’t (!!)

Following the Feeling

When the birthday conversations started looping, I found myself hesitating and getting stuck in my usual pattern of trying to ‘decide’ when all I felt was indecision, when instead I could have been listening to what I felt like. I was trying to assemble a plan that made sense externally, instead of paying attention to what my body had already decided.

Then, almost offhandedly, a friend suggested going for a hike outside of town for my birthday.

I knew in my gut almost immediately that this was exactly how I felt like celebrating. So I followed the feeling and booked a few small mountain cabins an hour outside Cape Town, kept the group tight, resisted the urge to over-plan, and trusted that whatever unfolded would be enough simply because it already felt right.

Water Moves the Way It Always Has

After a night observing the most vividly bright stars I’ve seen in ages, we hiked up to a rock pool carved into the mountain of Du Toitskloof, just past Paarl. The water was cold and crystal-clear, and tasted like exactly what it was: fresh mountain water flowing down an enormous waterfall tucked into a shady crevice of a beautiful mountain, glistening in the light.

We swam, then laid on a warm rock while the sun pressed down and a cool breeze moved through our tired limbs and rustling packets of biltong. For a while, no one needed to talk. There was nothing to optimize or change, no Instagram story to capture, nothing to justify.

Watching the river move past me, doing exactly what rivers have always done, something obvious finally landed in a way it hadn’t before: water flows downstream.
(Bare with me I know this feels obvious.) My point, I think, is that water in a river doesn’t exhaust itself attempting to be somewhere it isn’t meant to be. It just rides the flow of gravity and eventually ends up in the sea (don’t we all, in a way?)

Water Can’t Flow Upstream

We spend a surprising amount of our adult lives trying to push ourselves against our own current, convinced that with enough discipline or willpower we can force alignment where there is none. We tell ourselves that discomfort is worth the growth, that exhaustion is a necessary toll, that if we stop pushing we’ll somehow fall behind.

But our intuition and our energy and our sense of curiosity know something else.

Sitting in that river, even briefly, reminded me how much effort we waste swimming against ourselves, and how different life feels when we allow ourselves to move in the direction we’re already leaning toward.

Water can’t flow upstream. And neither can we, at least not indefinitely.

Sometimes the most grounded thing we can do is stop forcing momentum where it no longer wants to exist, listen carefully to where your energy naturally gathers, and let yourself move, slowly, imperfectly, and most importantly without apology or guilt, in that direction instead.