FLOWING RIVER

In my younger days, when I was living back in Staples, Minnesota, I would often travel north of town a few miles, to the Crow Wing River. This river, at least in those days, was one of the most peaceful and cleanest rivers in the state. I would go out to this remote spot that I loved so much, and just sit on the riverbank in the summer sun and watch the river flow by. There was something serene and peaceful about it, and it always put me in a pensive mood. “Kind of like watching paint dry?” you say. Not if you go there and let it work its magic.

Life, to me, has always seemed like a continuous flowing river. You get one chance to enjoy it. Then, it goes around the bend and there’s no getting it back. There is little you can do to slow its flow, or alter its course. You can only enjoy the moment, make good decisions and go for it. Like the river, you have no idea what is coming along next. It might be something wonderful that you had never thought of before. Then again, it might just dry up and leave you with nothing but mud and rocks to look at. It might even send a wall of water that causes you to momentarily scramble out of the way, but life has taught me that these things are temporary. You deal with them, and then you can go back and sit on the bank once more, and dream. For every trouble that comes your way, there will often be opportunities to set it all right.

We need not dwell on our regrets, but still keep our eyes fixed on the upstream part of life, because life past is just that. But there are lessons to be learned if we pay attention. Yesterday is history, and tomorrow is a mystery, and it is that mystery we pin our hopes on. There are times you want to just slip in, and go with the flow, because it seems so easy, so comfortable to do right now. But something tells you to be cautious, and make a good decision, because once you accept the status quo, it’s hard to go back to your dreams. Swimming upstream, against the current, is very tiring and you may never get back to that spot where you were. All of those opportunities yet to come, that you couldn’t wait for, will now be behind you, and they will spend the rest of your life chasing you far downstream, most likely never catching you. I like to look at the faces of our young people as they graduate and go out into life, but always, I wonder when the seriousness will set in for them. For most of us, that time comes when we have offspring, and we realize the ramifications that will come if we continue to degrade our earth, our values and our way of life. We know that by the time they start to think, like we are now thinking, it may be too late and we won’t be here to say, “I told you so.” On the other hand, it’s hard to be advice-givers when we have made such a mess of things already. It’s hard to say “I told you so,” when we were so much a part of the problem. I know that, someday, mankind will succeed in eliminating themselves because, for some strange reason, we seem destined to do that. Soon after we are gone, the earth will replenish itself, because Mother Nature is far more resilient than we are. For now, she is just putting up with us and our antics.