Imagine standing in a fast-moving river. The water doesn’t care that you have planted your feet. It keeps going, and you spend the whole time trying not to fall over. Picture the same river when you stop bracing and start moving with the current. The water hasn’t changed. You have.
I imagine that image, more or less, is what Alan Watts was reaching for when he wrote that “the only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” The line is from his 1951 book The Wisdom of Insecurity.
I listen to Watts a lot on YouTube. There is something about his voice — that calm, half-amused tone — that makes the message land differently than it does on a page. He keeps saying, in one form or another, that the world is moving whether you agree to it or not, and that the question is not whether you can stop the music but whether you are willing to step out into the room.
Perhaps, the clearest version of this in my own life is the three businesses I have started. Each one I went into afraid, and in each case the fears proved out in different ways. The first was a leathercraft side hustle. The second was an online school; the money ran out. The last was an online coffee startup.
None of them turned into the success story I had imagined while I was starting them. And yet I don’t regret starting any of them.
The interesting thing about plunging in is that the change happens to you whether or not the venture works. I came out of each one knowing things I would not otherwise know, and being someone slightly different from the person who walked in. That is the part Watts is pointing at, I think. The dance is not “things go well if you commit.” The dance is “you become something different by moving with it.”
Another example from my life is moving to Vietnam. I had been working in finance in Ireland in my early twenties, looking at the people ten and fifteen years ahead of me on the same track, and quietly deciding I did not want to become them. So I left. I told myself I would travel for a year or so and see what happened. What happened was nine years in Southeast Asia, a job running an adult language school, a couple of business attempts, and the slow discovery that I could write for a living.
The thing I remember most about the first year in Vietnam is not the difficulty. It is how much was new. The noise of the bikes, the food, the language I was butchering, the slow process of figuring out which streets went where. The newness made the time feel enormous. I think that is what Watts means by joining the dance. When there is something genuinely new to lean into, the leaning makes the whole thing lighter.
I am not a psychologist, but I think some of what Watts is describing ties into more contemporary work. Steven Hayes, who is one of the founders of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, talks about difficult feelings as something you work with rather than against. He describes pain this way in one interview: “It’s an energy and it’s not something that needs to be subtracted or eliminated. It’s an energy that’s very powerful.” His prescription, more or less, is to stop trying to push the door in the direction you want it to open, and instead let the hinge swing it around.
That maps onto Watts almost perfectly, only in the vocabulary of clinical research instead of Eastern philosophy. The thing that is trying to knock you down is also the thing carrying the energy. You just have to stop bracing.
There is a version of this advice that turns into “just be present” mush, and I don’t want to land there. I have written before about the trap of confusing motion with commitment — about starting a lot of things in a way that looks like progress but is really avoidance. That critique still stands. The way I have come to think about it is that the motion problem is mostly about work — browser tabs, half-started projects, starting a fourth thing because the third one got hard.
I think the Watts move, by contrast, is about life. About the bigger shape. About whether you are willing to plunge into a change that has already arrived at your door — a job ending, a place no longer fitting, a relationship that has run its course — rather than spending years pretending it has not. Those are different problems — one is failing to commit to anything, the other is failing to let go of something that has already left.
My read, looking back, is that almost everything that has shaped me came from a moment where I stopped bracing and started moving. The businesses, even the ones that ended. Vietnam. Writing. Each time the fear was real, the fear was largely justified, and the change worked on me in ways I could not have planned for. I am not above this advice. I am still, most weeks, trying to apply it.
A quick caution: If you are in the middle of a hard change right now — a job, a relationship, a place — I will say plainly that I am not the person to tell you what to do. I am a writer who reads a lot. A conversation with someone trained in this kind of thing is a better starting point than an essay.
What I notice most in Watts’ line, reading it back, is the last word. It isn’t resignation, and it isn’t strategy — it’s dance. The word implies, quietly, that this is supposed to be something you do with the change rather than against it. Whether or not the music is to your taste.
