Jesus heals a man who was sick for 38 years—what else would you expect him to do? The man who was sick for all these years had suffered enough; the man had known no difference between a Sabbath day and other six days. The Jews accuse Jesus of working on a Sabbath. Jesus found no reason to defend or explain himself, except that he said that my father is always working, so am I. They again accused him further for calling God ‘his father’ and equating himself to God. Jesus was unapologetic.
We often limit ourselves to fit in, be accepted, and be right, sometimes even to systems that are corrupt and unkind. Here the pressure on Jesus is to fit in. Jesus’ life began to be at risk, for it is said that the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him. Society is hard on people who do not fit in. Jesus continued his good works. Jesus went with the flow; with an absolute trust in father, here in this passage is a long monologue by Jesus underlining his trust in the father, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees his father doing. For whatever the father does, the son does likewise...” John 5: 17-30 could be read as the ultimate description of someone living in a state of profound, uninterrupted "flow"—and consequently, experiencing life to its absolute fullest.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian American psychologist, who spent decades studying what makes people feel truly alive, coined the term "flow”. He described it as a state of complete immersion in an activity. In flow, the ego falls away, internal friction vanishes, there is complete trust, and every action and thought follows effortlessly from the previous one. In a flow state, over self-consciousness disappears. You aren't worried about protecting your pride or calculating how others perceive you. He has entirely bypassed the fragile human ego. Because there is no self-promotion or pride to defend, there is no anxiety. Flow happens when you are so attuned to what you are doing that there is no hesitation between thought and action. Jesus’ actions are perfectly synchronised with the Father's will. People in flow do things for the sheer, meaningful sake of doing them, not for external rewards or applause. Jesus was completely immune to both the praise and the hatred of the crowds around Him.
For Jesus in John 5, this wasn't a fleeting psychological peak; it was His baseline reality. He didn't just step into "the flow" to perform a miracle; He lived in the continuous, unbroken flow of the Father’s love. Living completely unburdened by ego, fully aligned with a higher purpose, and totally connected to the source of life is the very definition of living fully. He isn't just surviving the human experience; He is moving through it with absolute mastery, lightness, and peace.
There is a cruelty in caring too much about being right. It sounds like a virtue; conscientiousness, care, precision. But beneath it, if you look honestly, is usually something less noble: fear. Fear of being wrong in front of others. Fear of being found out. Fear that one clumsy sentence, one imperfect idea, one moment of exposed uncertainty will collapse the careful image you have been maintaining. And so you tighten. You over-prepare. You edit yourself before you have even begun. You become your own most aggressive critic, and you appoint that critic to stand guard at the door of every thought before it is allowed to exit. This is the bitter irony at the heart of perfectionism: the more desperately you chase being good, the worse would be the result.
In the flow state you are so fully absorbed in what you are doing that the self, as a worried observer, temporarily disappears. You are not watching yourself work. You are simply working. The writer who looks up and discovers three hours have passed without noticing. The surgeon whose hands seem to move with a knowledge deeper than thought. The teacher mid-lesson who is no longer performing but genuinely present, and the students can feel the difference.
The key word is trust. Flow cannot happen without trust: trust in yourself, trust that what you have practiced and lived and learned is enough to carry you through without constant supervision. People who are obsessed with being right cannot access flow. The river does not doubt the ground. And the ground, for its part, has never yet refused the river.
You are at your worst when you are most afraid of being your worst. The tightening, the monitoring, and the obsession with acceptability; none of it protects you. It only narrows you. Your best work will not come from greater caution. It will come from the moment you care enough about the work itself to stop caring so anxiously about what others think of it; the moment the self steps aside, the doing begins, and time, for a little while, disappears. That is flow. That is where you live, when you are most alive.
Watch a river. Not from a photograph. Not through a car window. Actually sit beside one: the Cauvery, the Ganga, the Amazon, it does not matter; and watch it for long enough that your own breathing slows to match it. You will notice something that is obvious and yet, the longer you look, becomes almost miraculous: the river never stops to consider whether it is flowing correctly.
It does not pause at the rock to ask whether going left or right will be better received. It does not hold a committee meeting at the waterfall's edge. It does not rehearse the rapids. It simply moves, with everything it has, in the only direction available to it; and in that complete, uncomplicating surrender to its own nature, it becomes the most beautiful thing in the landscape. Csikszentmihalyi would have recognised the river immediately. It is always in flow.
A river has no ego. This is its great secret. It does not carry the memory of yesterday's drought into today's current. It does not worry about the ocean it has not yet reached. It is not performing its flowing for the birds that drink from it or the poets who write about it. It flows because flowing is what it is, not what it does, but what it is. The doing and the being are one thing.
A river is beautiful not despite its obstacles but because of how it meets them. The rock in the middle of the current does not make the river ugly; it makes it sing. The narrow gorge does not diminish the river, it concentrates it, forces it into a power and a music it could not have found in flat, unobstructed ground. The river does not resent the rock. It does not go rigid with anxiety at the sight of the gorge. It finds the shape that the obstacle offers and moves through it, changed, but undefeated. The Cauvery is not the Cauvery because it flows through easy flatland. It is the Cauvery because of every stone, every season, and every canyon that shaped it across ten thousand years of becoming.
A river does not know it is beautiful. It has no mirror. It seeks no applause. It does not flow more elegantly when people are watching or grow careless when no one is. Its beauty is not a performance. The mystics of every tradition understood this. The Zen master says: before enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water. After enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water. The difference is not the action. The difference is the absence of the one who is watching the action and approving it and building an identity around it. The river does not know it is a river. And that unknowing is its freedom.
A river does not arrive. It is always arriving and never arrived. The Ganga at Varanasi is not a completed thing; it is a continuous event, a verb disguised as a noun. And the life lived in flow is the same: not a destination you reach, not a permanent state you achieve and then protect, but a way of moving through the world that must be chosen again and again, in each moment, with each breath. Trusting the skill we have built. Trusting the moment in front of us. Trusting that the rock in the middle is not a stop sign but an invitation to find a new shape.
The most beautiful aspect of a river is that it flows. Whether it is clean, or wide, or ancient, or mighty is secondary. That it flows; without apology, without hesitation, without the exhausting self-monitoring. It never stops mid-current to verify that the ground ahead will continue to hold it. It never demands a guarantee from the valley before it commits to flowing through it. It never asks the mountain: are you certain there is somewhere for me to go? It simply moves forward; into the unseen, around the unknown bend, through the uncharted dark of the narrow gorge; with a complete, almost reckless faith that there is ground ahead, that the journey has a logic even when the destination is hidden. This is not the river's naivety. This is the river's deepest wisdom. And it is, in the language of psychology, the very foundation on which flow is built.
Trust feels like surrender. It looks, from the outside, like letting go of control. And so careful people; people who care enormously about outcomes, about being right, about maintaining the image of competence, resist it with everything they have. They grip tighter. They plan more. They supervise more closely. They believe that control is the path to excellence, and that trust is a luxury for the careless.
But control, past a certain point, is the enemy of excellence. Because control requires you to operate only within what is already known, already mapped, already approved. And the most alive moments; in music, in surgery, in conversation, in love, in any human endeavour worth the name, happen at the edge of the known. In the space that no amount of preparation can fully illuminate. In the bend of the river you have not yet reached. The grip cannot take you there. Only the current can. And the current requires one thing, always the same thing: that you let go of the bank.
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