As an element, water has yin properties: it’s soft and yielding.
That doesn’t mean it’s weak.
Anyone who has experienced the devastation of flooding can tell you that water can do a lot of damage very quickly.
In the New York City area, we’ve had a lot of rain this hurricane season. Last week we had a rain storm that brought the area to a halt.
The rain was the remnants of the most recent hurricane. Unlike a tropical storm or hurricane, it came alone, without massive winds. Just buckets of water, it arrived in a deluge at high tide on the morning of the full moon in Aries.
By the end of the day, a record 8.65 inches had fallen at JFK Airport.
Flash flooding led to closed roads and suspension of mass transit. Cars were abandoned in streets that turned into rivers.
I left my house that morning at 5 am to drive to the gym in a drizzle. A few hours later, some of those streets had turned into rivers. A local lake overflowed into a street. Main thoroughfares were unpassable.
In the backyard of my house, a lake formed.
By the next day, all the water had been absorbed. Roads had cleared. Everything was drying out.
What Causes Flash Flooding
The combination of rain on a full moon always increases the risk of storm surge — especially when the rain arrives at high tide. At a full moon, high tides are higher, leaving less space for more water.
According to climate experts, the other big factor that contributed to the floods in that storm was the fact that the soil was already saturated from all the rain we received earlier in the month.
It was the wettest September in NYC in over a century, and the second most rain in September in over 150 years.
It rained 14 out of 30 days of the month, with a total of over 14 inches, which is three times the average for September in New York. More than a third of that total came on September 29, the day of the full moon in Aries.
The Limits of Absorption
On one hand, the soil benefits from the rain.
But it can’t absorb so much at once. When it’s already saturated from previous rain storms, its capacity to absorb more is limited, increasing the risk of flooding.
At the other extreme, flash flooding can occur after a drought, because the soil can become too dry and hardened to absorb the water.
Soil can absorb the water, eventually. But it takes time for the water to sink in.
The Metaphor of Flooding
As I watched the lake in the backyard recede, and drove again on roads that had been cleared of water, it occurred to me that this was a perfect metaphor for how our nervous systems work.
In fact, the metaphor of flooding and drowning is already in our language.
When we are inundated with too much information we say we are flooded with information.
When we experience a rush of emotions that feels like too much to handle, we say we are flooded with emotions.
We might describe how we are drowning under a heavy workload and too much to do.
When we feel so busy and overwhelmed by our workload or projects, we might say that we are under water.
The flood occurs when what we are trying to take in or do exceeds our current capacity.
The Nervous System’s Rest and Digest Function
More is not always better. Sometimes it’s just more.
When we are already inundated with information, if we haven’t had a chance to process it, trying to take in more will lead to a flood.
At the other extreme, just like dry soil can’t absorb the rain, if you were starving or dehydrated, taking in too much food or water at once will make you sick. The nourishment must come in slowly, giving the body time to absorb and integrate it. The function of an IV-drip is to modulate the flow of nutrients into the body so the body can absorb it.
In the same way, if your muscles are weak, lifting big heavy weights quickly will only create injury. You must start slowly, with lighter loads, and give yourself time to adapt and adjust before increasing the intensity.
Rest is a crucial part of this equation.
It’s during the rest phase that muscle tissue is built. It’s at rest that the body absorbs nutrients from the food we ingest.
This is the function of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is known as the “rest and digest” response.
2 Ways to Apply This Lesson to Learn More Effectively
Whether we are learning something new, doing research, or just reading the news, there’s a limit to how much we can process at any one time.
The goal of learning new things isn’t just to learn them; it’s to know them. Knowledge is embodied; it comes from within you.
The metaphor of flash floods teaches us that we must do two things to set ourselves up for more effective learning.
Step 1: Priming
The first step is what we do before learning new things. Whether it’s taking in information or learning a skill, we must prime our nervous systems and our brains to be able to receive the information.
This means limiting how much information we take in before we sit down to lean what’s important to us.
Years ago, I used to start my days with the television on the news. I never realized how much cognitive capacity was being used by processing that information.
Over a decade ago, I stopped watching news in the morning and noticed it made a big difference.
I also used to read in the morning, but noticed how filling my mind with that information — even when it was useful — limited my cognitive capacity to do my important thought work.
Now I start my day without any outside inputs so that I don’t flood my system with too much information before I get to my important work.
Step 2: Integration
The second step comes after we have ingested the information.
To information into knowledge requires a period of digestion — a time to absorb and integrate what we ingested.
Sometimes this requires literal rest, like sleep and stillness. It also may require some type of “active recovery” — a way to integrate the information we learned into the body.
Without space for integration, information can’t sink into the soil of our being, and we become flooded.
Love it? Hate it? What do you think? Don't hold back...