Jenn texted me our horoscope:

“It would do you some good to try to go with the flow — be like a surfer riding a bodacious wave. You can choose to flail about and try to fight the current, but you’ll only tire yourself out and feel like you failed. If you go with the flow, you will experience a rush of excitement — and power.”

Over yet another “we-will-survive-this-rough-wave-known-as-February” cup of coffee, we noted that the horoscope did NOT tell us to:

“Be like a sun-bather napping on the beach, hit by some random wave and maybe carried out to sea or thrown on the rocks: just allow it to take you wherever.”

Passivity is the “near enemy” of going-with-the-flow — it’s a quality that appears to be similar, but is actually almost opposite:

Surfers intend to surf, make an effort to determine how that experience will go, and adjust to changing conditions as they go.

They PLAN. They get their boards, check out weather and sea patterns, determine and paddle out to the line-up (so SO not passive — especially on the arms!), watch, wait, and pick a wave. None of that is completely in the surfer’s control — nor is what happens next.

They receive the wave.

The wave will be somewhat different than expected. (You cannot predict life. Or control life. Or February.) But the surfers use skills and judgement to try and ride that wave. Sometimes they bail out. (They know there will be more days and more waves.) Sometimes they wipe out. They don’t oppose the wave, and yet they have a role.

When life crashes some situation onto us, going with the flow means “do not grasp onto it OR fight it” — it does NOT mean we’re obligated to take everything as it comes and let it have its way with us. Heck we can/may/should go looking for a situation of our own choosing or at least alter the one we don’t like.

hot link to surfwyoming.com!

So when we start our own pithy-Wyomingites-drinking-coffee-with-glorious-friends-to-make-February-as-fun-as-a-vacation’s horoscope column, it will read:

“You’re a surfer, dude, not flotsam.”