"...we must not oppose forces higher than our own."

What use is there in fighting against the tide? I’m sure you will find, like all good mermaids, that swimming along with the current is much finer, just as singing along to the music is gentler on the senses than sticking ones fingers in ones ears and sticking one’s head in a hole. The waves will carry you or they will smash you, but they will not be carried by you, so spare your head and stop banging it against the wall. Now and again it is useful to yield to forces which are far beyond our control. It is certainly a lot less painful. For example it is common knowledge that hitting your thumb with a hammer on a cold day causes more agony than executing the exact same misstep on a hot day. This is due to the fact that on a cold day your muscles are tensed up already against the chill. The pain is less if you can go all loosy goosey and roll with the punches like a drunk man skidding under a truck on his little crotch rocket… if he were sober he’d be horrified and tense up, try to stop himself from inevitably hitting the pavement jerking all over the place straining his body unduly, for nothing that he can do at this point will change his fate- hit the pavement he will.. As is, with senses inebriated he will roll through like a ball of putty. It may be that he should not have set foot in such dark and dangerous waters to begin with, that point is arguable, what is certain is that once the titans were ready to tear him limb from limb there was no recourse but to allow them to do what they would. A struggle would only result in more damage done. We are all bound to be chewed up and spat out by father time and mother nature. It is how we weather this experience that counts. If we help them to chew us up by wriggling and sawing ourselves against their serrated teeth in a terrible panic there will be little left of us when our time to meet the spittoon arrives. If we maintain a certain calm and endure the discomfort without worsening our situation we’re likely to come out no more than a little dented. If we take things a step further and work with the motion of their grinding we may be able to whittle ourselves into remarkable swan shaped bits of gory gooey chew. There is no sense in fighting against forces which are stronger than our own. Instead we should move in sympathy with those forces and use them as opportunities. We are all bound by the laws governing existence to change shape. We may work consciously with the floods and the winds that will make mountains of us. If we work with the flow rather than against it we may be able to soar like those cunning birds of prey, riding the winds rather than being thrashed by them. Like good mermaids and dashing surfers we must make use of the currents. We must accept that we are always being moved by forces higher than our own. If we are quick and alert we may be able to take advantage of our ride and use it to shape ourselves as desired. Consider the beautiful bits of multicolored sea glass prized by beach combers and jewelers. They were once bottles battered and broken by the sea. At no point is it likely that the bottle, a bottle that was once pressed to a sailor’s rough lips before being tossed overboard, could have foreseen its destiny as a tiny smooth bit of glass set in silver as a pendant to be worn on the breast of an elegant young woman. The bottle could only submit to the roaring surf and the abrasive sands and through their tough loving be transformed from trash into treasure.

Experiment