Moving with the Currents

The following passage is taken from the book 'Memoirs of a Geisha' by Arthur Golden. The metaphor 'leapt' out at me - so to speak, when I first read it. I understand immediately that in life, sometimes we don't have control over certain things that happened to us. Under such circumstances, the best we can do is to accept the situation as 'one of those things in life', and move on.

"We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we have played, it is perfectly clear that we are affected everyday by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. What are we to do? We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them."

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. - Orson Scott Card