Flow

A river is simply water moving down a slope as a result of gravity. The environment the water travels through may change dramatically, but the water never stops flowing. The headwaters of a river may look like tiny creeks from melting patches of snow along a ridge and the mouth a vast estuary, hardly resembling its start, yet the river is one. Through the mountains the water flows. Through the forests, the plains the water flows. Through the city, neighborhoods, and countryside the water flows. Over cliffs the water falls, cascades, but never does it cease its flow. The water flows under sheets of ice, around rocks, over logs. The water flows tirelessly carving into the earth leaving its mark in the canyons, the oxbow lakes. We can dam the rivers but the water continues it flow, over our walls, eventually building the force to take the wall down entirely and any amount of stagnancy we were able to fake all comes rushing at once, flowing, beating, moving forward relentlessly. You may stand in a river and in thirty seconds standing in that same water is an impossibility, the water will not cease its flow to linger around you ankles. Time is so much a fluid, so much a river. Flowing. Life is defined by time and fluid in the very same way as minutes and rivers. Life is not defined by huge life altering events, for these are very few. Life is so much a fluid, so much a transition. You graduate from High school, vacation in Italy, land an internship, graduate from college, land a job, get a promotion. Those events add to three weeks, being generous. What did you do for the other 205 weeks? Cease to exist? So much much of our life is spent not being able to wait for (insert awesome thing here). I am currently the worst offender of this, refusing to move fluidly through me life, I had my mind made up to live the next 6 months of my life as though they did not matter. I have already said multiple times that I cannot wait until February. In order to correct this mindset, that is ultimately wasting 6 months of my life, I am pledging to embrace the fluidity of life and take full advantage of the free time I have stumbled into. These next 6 months will be just as meaningful to me as any other moment of my life. After all nobody looks at a river and values it for individual liters of water. We look at a river as a river and when I look at my life it will be as one whole constant stream of experience. Each one fading into the next, a moment never fading before a new one comes into existence. My life has no beginnings no endings. No hellos and no goodbyes. Like a river flowing to the sea, the words in a run on sentence, the minutes in a day, fluid. A river is fluid. Time is fluid, life, existence.