I used to spend hours just sitting by the riverbank. I’d watch it trace its long, inevitable line from the high country down into the valleys, swallowing up smaller streams as it cut toward the horizon. But I didn’t sit there just to lose myself in the sound of the rush or the music of the splashes. I sat there because the current felt like a riddle—a quiet truth I was desperate to untangle.
Photo by Cemrecan Yurtman from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/contemplative-moment-by-istanbul-seaside-36799201/
"Why must it always pull downward?" I’d ask myself.
And why does it hold so strictly to its path, unlike the roads we build that twist, turn, and second-guess themselves? I would stare into the moving water, hunting for whatever blueprint it kept hidden, hoping it might explain the larger mystery of just being alive.
One afternoon, I remember bending down to cup the water in my hands, feeling the sharp, sudden shock of its coldness against my skin. Looking out over the deep pools, the surface seemed entirely still, almost lazy. Yet I knew that beneath that calm face, the pressure was immense and heavy. I wondered then if that was a sacred mystery, or just the most obvious thing in the world. When the river was clean, the world below was transparent; you could count the stones. But when the rain came and turned it thick with silt, you were left completely blind to the depths.
Watching that change, my mind drifted, narrowing down to the map of my own life—to the heavy moments that defined me, the ones that altered my direction forever.
I thought about how, at the source high up in the mountains, a river is frail. It lacks the muscle to push through obstacles, yet the water there is entirely pure, clear, and beautiful to look at. That was me at the beginning. When I was born, I carried that same untouched purity. I was a clean slate, full of unwritten promise, and people naturally wanted to hold me, to be near that light. Like the infant river, I was small and lacked power, but I was moving.
But a life, like a river, cannot stay in the mountains.
To find its strength, the water has to join with other currents. As it grows, its only true instinct is to reach the destination, completely indifferent to the mud, the jagged rocks, or the debris it collects along the way.
We are no different. We start out needing our parents, or someone steady, to hold our hands and keep us from drying up. But as we run wilder into the world, our original clarity begins to cloud. We collect the grit of our experiences. We lose a bit of that early innocence, trading it for the sheer weight of moving forward.
Yet, as I look at the river now, I see that it never forgets its blueprint. Even when it seems to slow to a crawl, or when it rages through a narrow gorge, it moves with a single, unbroken intention. The secret is written right into the earth: just keep flowing.
We cannot choose what falls into our path. We cannot stop the storms from muddying our waters or the debris of life from cluttering the bed. But we must refuse to let the dirt change our course. The river will eventually find the ocean. By the time it arrives, it is no longer clear. The pressure is heavy, the volume is massive, and it carries the scars of the entire journey—but it is powerful.
That is the lesson I hold onto for you and me. Whatever gets thrown into our current is just noise. It doesn't get to define the water. The obstacles are just distractions. Let's keep going.