Walking against the mainstream

I’ve always described the sensation of walking against flow like fish swimming upstream, or like a sperm changing its mind.

I’ve never felt comfortable living a life like the majority do. Back when I was in school people like that were called alternatives. As in “that’s so-and-so; he’s an Alternative.” Meaning, a subculture of folk who dressed differently to everyone else, listened to different music, and had different opinions. Basically different to the mainstream.

As an adult, I took jobs that involved me driving the opposite direction to peak-hour traffic, or I started and finished work after peak hour traffic.

But it went further than this. Even when I found myself in a crowd of fellow alternatives I would find a way to be different… continuing to take a slightly different path again from this ‘mainstream’.

It’s not that I wanted to stand out. Far be it. I just didn’t want to be caught up in movements that weren’t necessarily unique to me.

Yesterday I caught up with a friend for his birthday. It was around 5pm. I was heading into the city, while the masses were all heading out.

It was daunting somewhat to be moving in a direction against the flow, with what looked like literally hundreds of people walking at me.

And I felt within my body an anxiousness. “This is what it must feel like for people who suffer from Anxiety every day,” I mused to myself as I ducked and weaved out of the paths of the horde of normal people with normal 9–5 day jobs.

And then I pondered my penchant for being apart from the mainstream.

And how many times I wondered whether moving against the commonplace flow was holding me back.

What had drawn me away from a life that is commonly acceptable, away from the expectations of conditioning?

Or was it more that the dreaming of my true nature was louder than the “you should do this!”….?

It may well certainly have been the case that allowing myself to passively get swept up in the current would have been easier; but was it appropriate? Did it serve my highest purpose?

I guess I’ll never know.

But the more I surrender into heeding the call of my dreaming, the easier it gets to move in a flow that isn’t with the mainstream.

Effort is there when I resist that dreaming. Effortlessness?—?wu-wei?—?is there when I don’t.

?????

Walking against the mainstream was originally published in Effortless Wellness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.