River

I don’t know how many of you have filled out those pretty lame autograph books in your last year in school or junior college. It was an exercise that I generally found tiresome and most often answered with wise-cracks that on reflection today don’t seem so wise. Little books filled with all kinds of stupid questions and somehow you had all 60 people having ones that looked different and hence the pressure to come up with something different to write in each one of them.  But one question that I still remember clearly was – which force of nature do you think you resemble the most? I answered instinctively ‘fire’ and even quoted Billy Joel. But once the spotlight was off of me, the swirling waters of introspection soon quenched those burning embers and I believe I settled on the river as being the force of nature I most resembled. I still believe that to be true, let me add. 

When I say that, I mean a river that is still charting its course, that still hasn’t met the sea and that flows on relentlessly taking along with itself all it encounters, gold or garbage, making no differentiation and along the way dumping that which wouldn’t willingly come along, again with no partiality to gold or garbage. A river that doesn’t plan before it flows but flows where it pleases or where the opportunity presents itself. A river that once it encounters an immovable force does not budge and puts all its weight against said force until it makes a way for itself; but then as opposing force after force weakens it, takes the smarter, if longer, way around them. Mind you it has not failed nor given up, for as it meanders around its obstacle, presenting an illusion of defeat, it continues to work against it until it finds a way through, leaving behind the legacy of a lake, often useful, sometimes beautiful too. This river isn’t averse to meeting new streams, joining with them and flowing along as one, or of others leaving to form new channels and paths to the one ultimate fate. A river that along its path nourishes all it touches, sometimes floods and often destroys in its fury too; that washes the dirt and the sins but may leave behind a stain too. Where this river may further head and how long and how powerful will it flow before it inevitably meets the sea is a secret time alone holds.

So what is it that reminded me of this river and of those silly little autograph books that, mind you, I still have in safe-keeping? Well, life is strange, and some comments that bear no reflection upon your life, made in earnest by another, break open the dams that have so long held back the flow….