Be the Bowl, Not the Channel

There are weeks when a single word won’t let go of you. For me right now, it’s acceptance. It keeps showing up when I least expect it. In conversations, in songs, in texts. Maybe because it’s exactly what I need to learn right now.

I’ve spent quite some time now trying to understand my new environment, manage it, and shape everything around me, while at the same time trying to reinvent my own path. Maybe I’ve finally acknowledged that it is a lot at the same time. Maybe a bit too much all at once. Too much for one person to carry. The steps I kept taking outwardly, while trying to make sense of the chaos surrounding me, while processing all of my inner world too. I was tired. Not the kind of tired a weekend fixes, but the kind that says: this is too much for one person. Energy is running out of the program. I am empty. And maybe that’s ok.

A dear friend here doesn’t get tired of giving me the same sentence, again and again: just because you can do something doesn’t mean you have to. And I think she is right. Just because I’m capable of surviving in boiling water doesn’t mean I have to stay there. In cool water, there’s maybe less pain. It’s most probably refreshing, and it’s vivid. A little rest and refreshment sounds quite appealing to me right now. Like a mountain river, or the sea in the early morning hours.

Somewhere in all of that, all of a sudden, an text I’d once read years ago came back to me today, attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux: be the bowl, not the channel. A channel gives almost the instant it receives. It never keeps anything for itself. A bowl waits until it’s filled, until it overflows, and only what overflows is passed on, without the bowl depleting itself.

This isn’t an argument for selfishness. It’s an argument for sequence. Fill first, then pour. Whoever empties themselves to enrich others will, in the end, have nothing left to give anyone. If my own cup is empty, no one can drink from it. If I am empty, how shall I have the right energy to go forward. Aligned, not out of survival mode. If I am not good, how shall I be good for anyone else. So maybe it is time to accept that it is time to cut the pace.

At the weekend I heard a German song at the end of a film that stuck with me: “Im Fluss.” A coincidence that doesn’t feel like one, since the same theme keeps running through everything right now:

flowing instead of fighting, acting from intuition and love instead of pressure and fear, trusting the path even when it isn’t straight. Trusting the process instead of forcing it.

Calm, presence, peace, pause. Why is it so hard to accept this, to acknowledge it for oneself?

It fits, too, with something someone told me recently – that I’ve been breathing shallowly. No wonder, when everything feels like a single, endless sprint, no? But why run, when the direction is still unclear at some points? Sometimes slowing down isn’t weakness. It’s the only honest response. Out of respect for you and the people around you, and to find the clarity you need to continue.

And that keeps circling back to something simpler still: no light without darkness, no movement without rest. What feels like standstill right now might be exactly what makes the next stage, the next move, possible. You can’t shine without having first passed through the dark, and you can’t keep moving without giving rest the space it needs. The space out of which the next movement can even arise.

Maybe that’s why another old saying has been on my mind: whatever you want to do quickly, do slowly. Take the pace out. Pull the air deeper into your lungs instead of just breathing shallowly. Let it flow. Not passively, not just waiting around, but not forced either. It’s not about doing nothing. It’s about acting in a way that feels coherent, rather than like another race against time, roles, expectations, pressure.

We probably have to lose ourselves again and again in order to recalibrate. Not once in a lifetime, but repeatedly. Every time one chapter ends and another begins, there’s this stretch where nothing quite fits anymore: the old patterns no longer work, and the new ones aren’t ready yet.

But is that really losing yourself? Maybe it’s less about loss and more about the uncomfortable in-between that inevitably sits between two stages of growth. Not a flaw in the system, but a necessary passage. A caterpillar doesn’t lose itself when it withdraws into a cocoon. It dissolves in order to reassemble itself. From the outside, that might look like standstill or regression. From the inside, it’s the only way one thing can become.

I’m no longer who I was before I started trying to order everything here, but I’m also not yet who I’ll become through this process. And that’s ok. Even though I’m used to pace, to efficiency, to discipline, to the “have to.” But what if this situation doesn’t ask for more effort right now. What if it asks for pause. And I allow it. This shows me vulnerable, but it allows me deeper connections too. Allows me to receive support from the beautiful people around. Together we are less alone. Together I don’t have to carry all of this alone.

So maybe I’m allowed to acknowledge what I’ve accomplished so far: building a new life in a new country. And maybe I’m allowed to make myself a priority again, to ask myself what I need before I ask what others need from me. To be the bowl, not the channel.

Søren Kierkegaard already knew this: every decision is a leap into the unknown, and every leap hurts. Every yes to something is a no to something else, and the other way around. For now, I say yes to pause.

I try to accept, to allow myself to get air into my lungs, and find clarity for the next thing ahead. Step by step. And that clarity, I’ve learned, is something we find when everything on the outside quiets down a bit.

I pause. I rest. And that is ok.