The Surprise of Our Own Unfolding
These lines followed an email I received the other day–
I live like a river flows,
Carried forward by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
They weren’t familiar, but I was moved as I reread them a few times. Searching for the author, I found John O’ Donohue, whose exact words were–
I would love to live like a river flows,
carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.
The difference between “I live like a river flows” and “I would love to live like a river flows” seemed not insignificant. The email’s ending suggests that the sender is already experiencing what the poet says he yearns for. Personally, I’m not sure whether I am or would love to, but I let myself meditate on what it could mean in my life.
I turned to Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, which my notes tell me I read ten years ago. They also led me to this passage, as he describes what his training as a riverboat pilot taught him about the river.
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book–a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.
And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparkingly renewed with every reperusal.”
One could do worse, I thought, than live like that Mississippi of Twain’s imagination. A new story every day, never a page void of interest, never a day you would want to skip (how many of us have wanted to skip days during these last seven months?) and no higher enjoyment somewhere else. Right here, right now.
He goes on to say, however–
“Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!”
Something gained, but something precious lost, just like Judy Collins sang in Both Sides Now. “Something’s lost but something’s gained, in living every day.”
I grew up within easy walking distance of a river. I live near one now. We walk by it a lot. I love the different moods it presents and how it mirrors the autumn leaves and the watery sun in winter and the green bangles of summer. I let it teach me, but I can’t remember ever wishing I could live like it.
We’re all going somewhere right now, even though it feels chaotic as hell.
We’re like the meandering river Thoreau wrote about, “sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.” We might as well be that intentional about it and be carried along by the surprise of our own unfolding.
