The hero’s journey. A Journey of becoming. The fight against all odds to eventually emerge victorious and then return home to the place where it all began, having changed the world and, in the process, changed oneself.
Sharing something special with someone special. A journey of belonging. Finding that person takes time and energy; it’s not so simple as swiping right or left based on the algorithm. Maybe that can be a starting point, but the feeling of belonging comes through the repeated effort of making time and space to share life’s experiences together. Not optimised for speed and efficiency, actually, in spite of it being inconvenient and difficult.
The journey towards becoming who you are and belonging with someone has something in common. Both are delivered only in the movement towards it. The friction creates the frisson. Make it simple. Make it fast. Make it easy. Make it convenient. Make it accessible to all. Somehow, this removal of friction makes it less, not more.
If nature teaches us anything, it’s this. There is a season and a reason for everything. A seed takes time to sprout and grow into a tree. Babies take 9 months to be born. A caterpillar transforms into a butterfly in the cocoon. Helping it get out faster or easier never makes it stronger. It weakens and disables it, or, even worse, the transformation never happens.
The journey of becoming and belonging needs friction. It needs the fights and the difficulties. The twists and turns that seem like delays and setbacks are all part of the grand plan called life.
As Brian Klaas says so eloquently in his book Fluke, “we control nothing, but influence everything,” and it’s no fluke that I read this line and connected it to my reflections on the importance of friction in life. Maybe the smart move is not to always seek to reduce it (friction) but to embrace the hard moments for what they are, the ones that shape us into who we were meant to be. The universe is always listening and trying to tell me something.
Flow and friction are not opposed. Sometimes friction prepares me for the new direction into which I must flow. Removing the friction, avoiding it, or trying to lessen it is often the real problem because I am not adequately prepared for my next chapter.
(P.S Note to self, is AI removing friction in my thinking, spoon feeding me maybe? Or is it making me think harder to stand out from the crowd that has outsourced their thinking to AI?)
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