I would love to live
like a river flows,
carried by the surprise
of its own unfolding.
— John O’Donohue, Fluent

This river is unfolding rapidly lately. We think of rivers as quietly predictable. We forget about the rapids and the plunges off of cliffs. Waterfalls are simply rivers with an abrupt change of state. And so it is that life can be exhilarating some days, and utterly exhausting other days. That’s life though, isn’t it? It will level out again one day. We learn to take it as it comes.

To paraphrase my favorite Navy pilot, I have seen the future, and I don’t have to like it. But we can work to influence that which we can control. It’s our life, such that it is, and we are the only ones who will ever have the front row seat on this journey.

A confession: I’ve quoted O’Donohue’s poem incorrectly. The original had capitalized the first letter of each line. My inclination to correct that is a weakness in my own way of thinking. He wrote what he wrote, and I ought to leave it well enough alone. So here you go:

I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.

It doesn’t matter how the poem was written. What mattered was the wisdom captured in a few words placed just so. We get so caught up in the trivial details that we drown ourselves instead of accepting everything as our unique, enthralling story. Here we are, moving through time from here to somewhere. We ought to look around and acknowledge what is.

Still, those waterfalls. It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the landing. We want to make a splash in our brief time before infinity, but it isn’t always what we expected it to be. It helps in such moments to remember the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

We learn that wisdom is only useful when it is acquired. We go through life stumbling across bits of wisdom along the way. It’s up to us whether we pick it up or leave it forgotten on the banks of missed opportunity. We are the sum of our parts, and in the end everything we accumulate will carry us somewhere, soon enough.

Here’s the thing about that poem we might have missed as we (I) focused on the way it was written: O’Donohue wasn’t telling us to live as he lives, he was telling us he’d love to live thusly. We are all figuring it out, forever surprised by life in all its stillness and turbulent moments. Be here, now. That is flow, and it will carry us from this moment onwards towards the next.