This old driving advice is the tagline of my blog. What does it mean?

When the rear of the car slides to one side, your impulse might be to slam on the brakes and grab the steering wheel to brace yourself. This resistance worsens the skid, and soon you’ll be careening down the road sideways or even backward. Instead, the thing to do is to turn towards the skid, after which you can drive normally.

We mess ourselves up by fighting life’s skids or by merely resigning ourselves to them. Embrace your fate, said Nietzsche. If you don’t get the internship of your choice, the mate you are crushed out on, or the physical health you once had, you will only make things worse by imagining otherwise and refusing to move on. Grab your remaining abilities, your next mate who will return your love, the work you can actually get, and enjoy the wild ride. This is what is meant by the Buddhist idea that what really counts is the grace with which we let go of things not meant for us. Of course, I resist the “meant for,” but the idea is the same without the fatalism. It’s what Kipling meant by saying that the saddest words of all are “what might have been.”

Skids happen; if you embrace them, life will be an adventure instead of a tragedy. Turning towards the skid doesn’t mean passively drifting through life, any more than the Taoist ideal of wu-wei (avoid purposive action) is a call to complacency. Instead, the idea is that fighting reality (usually by imposing an idea onto it about how things ought to be) wears you down, interferes with your effectiveness, and irritates other people. Move deftly within the actual landscape, not the landscape you wish you were in. Consider Russia’s celebrated General Kutuzov, who defeated Napoleon by avoiding battles (except Borodino, which Kutuzov lost). How is it possible to defeat the greatest army on earth by avoiding battles? Read War and Peace to find out.

“Turn in the direction of the skid” can also be read to mean, “Head toward slick areas.” If your goal is to get there without incident (fine for driving, but this is a metaphor), then dry roads will suit you. But if your goal is to become an expert driver or to live fully, look for icy patches.

Overpowering a skid is Apollinian in Nietzsche’s sense, admirably orderly and even beautiful, but tragically doomed to fail; turning with it is Dionysian, unplanned and uncontending, but vital and . Why not be both? Celebrate order and chaos. (Our present culture has such vast pathologies of order and caution that I don’t need a reminder to value structure.) When hurt, don’t say, “You can’t hurt me”; say, “Ouch.” The latter expresses hurt but also, by demonstrating that the hurt is expressible, in Nietzsche’s phrasing that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (metaphor alert: syphilis didn’t make him stronger). If you have to take a punch, take it drunk (metaphor alert). Once you get good at rolling with the punches, you will seek them out, like a martial artist looking for improvement or engrossment by sparring with experts.

Rather than stick with the prior plan for steering, let the terrain guide the driver, the patient’s reactions guide the therapist, the child’s reactions guide the parent, and the beef guide the butcher. If you want to change the world, or even yourself, think judo, not boxing. Of course, if you want to dominate something you can actually control—like a stubborn lid on a pickle jar—go ahead and kick its butt, but if it’s alive, don’t be surprised if some day it kicks yours.

After driving in Michigan and New England most of my life with rear-wheel drive, I became proficient in snow and ice. I also developed an appreciation of the landscape by attending to the grade of the roads I was on. Now I have a heavy, four-wheel-drive Wrangler, and I have forgotten how to navigate slick spots. If you have an anti-skid device (metaphor), throw it away; it’s making you stupid. Anti-skid devices include not talking in class and already knowing how the is going to unfold.

So make messes and clean them up. Don’t avoid making messes by claiming to be on top of things you can’t possibly be on top of (like other humans … or yourself). If you never skid, you’re not driving fast enough (metaphor!).

And that’s a basic aspect of the therapeutic frame, an implicit rule to explore the icy patches and, within the boundaries of the rest of the relational rules, to approach rather than resist the sense of confusion. (In fact, the rest of therapy’s rules help make icy roads into roller coasters and bumper cars.) Many people come for therapy because of the they feel from trying to control themselves as a result of living in situations that demand hyper-control. “Turn in the direction of the skid” is my way of remembering that it is impossible to tightly control complex systems. Human beings are complex systems.