Reading this issue’s five reflections on the Aotearoa New Zealand Curriculum (ANZC) has provoked us to think again on a returning question, that is, what is a curriculum—and its reform? We have thus come to think about the curriculum as an event that determines “at least in part, what we are, what we think and what we do today” (Foucault, 1984, p. 32). Furthermore, we have been musing on the shifts and movements of vā (Fa’avae, 2018) and power, and consider that a useful concept to think of the curriculum may be the moana—the vast ocean or space of interconnections. The curriculum conduces forms of power that ‘make us up’ (Hacking, 1986) and produces shifts of the vā that animates the souls (Ball, 2003) of those that take part in education. This commentary is an open conversation with the articles of this special section, and between the writers, an attempt to bring us together and think differently. It is riddled with contradiction, which we embrace as a prolific space where we can think together. First, we set the grounds for a decolonial reading of the curriculum, and ANZC's reform specifically. Secondly, we consider the curriculum as the currents that bring together and conduct a heterogeneity of beings (policy texts, discourses, technologies, actors, etc.) creating a sense of shared identities that connect the past, present and future. We also understand the ANZC as a fluid space where specific forms of power circulate and flow, and make us up as beings with particular capabilities. Finally, we conclude by asking what kind of life is possible in these waters. The articles in this issue agree on the potency of the ANZC to contribute to the making of productive, socially engaged and culturally aware citizens. We ask further as to what forms of knowledges, identities and subject positions are made available for students and educators in the curriculum.