To Decide and To Move On
A weary traveler stops for the night on the banks of a rushing, frothing river. He is inside the Arctic Circle and the day is long.
He unloads the heavy pack and pitches the tent. He’s hungry but decides to hold off on the meal. First, he’ll wash in the river, knowing the waters are barely a breath above freezing. His body refuses to even consider stepping into the river, but he has enough of a mind to overrule the body.
He’ll wash.
He finds a natural beach on the bank where the waters pool and he won’t have to fight the river.
The sun is almost kissing the horizon, painting the world in reds and pinks and all the hues of silence. The traveler steps into the waters, ankle-deep, and naked. The cold surges through his calves, knees, into his very heart, and lungs struggle to keep breathing.
He forces a breath. The air is cold. The river is cold.
Using his traveler’s cup, he collects water and pours it on his calves, his thighs, working up the nerve to let the cold touch the belly and the head. As the body adjusts to the sharpness, he pours water on his scalp and it runs down to re-join the river. Each droplet sears itself into his skin, prodding his body to be awake, awake as it had never been.
Breathing deepens.
He’s shivering now, but allows his frozen knees to buckle, slowly, and he kneels in the shallow water. The parts of the body that are now underwater are all but gone. Another half a minute and he feels nothing except the blade of his mind, sharpened to its utmost. He’s now only a spirit. Bodyless, hovering above the glacial river in the deep North. Each breath reaches farther into the dark reaches of his psyche that have never seen the light of day. Then he dips his head underneath the surface and all thought vanishes into the river.
On the other bank, a reindeer emerges from the shrubbery. It’s come to drink water in great gulps. High up in the sky a great sea eagle, with its careful eye, sees the crown of the reindeer and then the animal itself. The eagle’s body stiffens for an infinitesimal moment, calculating the angle of assault, but then relaxes. The reindeer is too large for prey.
Down by the river, the reindeer lifts its head, suddenly unnerved. When the traveler’s head breaks the surface of the river on the other bank the horned animal bounds away, river water sloshing in its belly.
The traveler, shivering, walks out of the river on feet devoid of all feeling. His whole body is seared with the cold, but his mind is a single point, like a knight’s lance. He puts fresh clothes on, feeling the first whispers of warmth, grabs his wooden walking stick, then sits on a large rock that is almost entirely in the river, a small peninsula. The rock emanates frost but he doesn’t mind. He’d been in the river and knows the cold cannot touch him, not for a little while anyway.
The sun is burning the horizon now. The edge of the world revels in a storm of color and perpetual light casts deep shadows upon the mountains.
The traveler gathers a towel tightly around his shoulders, holding the cold at bay. It’s almost time for him to go and rest, but he stays a little longer. After the many miles of the day, he knows sleep won’t be a problem. Not today. Not in the Arctic Circle, so far from the cacophony in the South.
Now is the time to think. Thinking is what he is here for, in the great expanse, hoping to give his mind space to unravel. Space to decide.
Immediately his mind contracts because he doesn’t know how to decide. His entire life he’d never learned the act of deciding and moving on. Every decision he’d ever made he’d regretted, and would have regretted the alternative too.
“What if I had made the wrong call?”
That is how the doubt starts and, before long, he’ll spiral into trying to change the past or embrace anxiety that makes every tomorrow just a bleak repetition of yesterday.
“What if I decide the wrong way?”
The thought echoes. The day had been long, filled with miles upon miles, and his body is exhausted. And yet, what tires him is the mind. The ceaseless chattering. He brings his knees to his chest and watches the river play as it rushes past him down toward a little river island, and then beyond view.
The river island is barely more than a rock decorated with low shrubbery and a single birch. The island is so small the traveler can see that it’s entirely wet and hadn’t known a dry day in all the long years of its existence.
The traveler can feel the river murmuring in his chest. It is there, unmistakable. He unsocks one of his feet and lowers it into the clear water. The shock of cold is immediate. He smiles, thinking that’s what getting born must have felt before the river of life sweeps us all away.
“The river of life…” — he mouths and looks at the river and the riverbed it had carved in the landscape for untold years. Life is much the same way — a gathering of energy unleashed upon the world where it carves its own riverbed of habits, breaks against its own river islands, and flows into the horizon where it finally disappeares into the vast quiet.
“Everybody should be quiet near a little stream and listen.” [1]
The glacial river of the deep North is hardly a stream but he remains quiet. The passage of water, like the passage of time, is best honored in silence.
The traveler watches the river rush toward the river island, then split into two tentacles, like his mind does when faced with a decision. Neither branch seems obviously better than the other. They stretch for a little while before turning a bend and vanishing from sight. If there are treacherous rapids on the left or menacing rocks lurking beneath the surface on the right, he cannot know. And yet he strains his eyes and strains his mind.
“Which way to go?”
The question rings out in the cold air. He’s sitting on a rock, in the deep North, and the water flows beneath his feet, but he’s not there anymore. His mind abandons the North and travels South, to the streets he knows well, to the people, to the life he’s led, to the decisions he’d made, to the regrets he has, never knowing which way to go, but always hoping the choices would be as clear as the water.
They never are.
Angered, he throws his walking stick into the water like a javelin, watching it disappear into the foam only to appear again on the surface. The ferocious waters toss the stick to and from, now sinking and now launching it into the air, but inevitably the stick nears the treacherous shores of the river island. The traveler watches it skirt the rocks and the gravel of the island and continue on its mad dance down the right branch of the river. In a moment it would soon be out of sight and the traveler already laments losing his walking stick, knowing he’d have to carve a new one tomorrow.
Then a thought smashes into his conscience.
“It doesn’t matter which way we take! Whether it is the left or the right, the rapids or the menacing rocks, the river will come to itself again…and it is the same with life.”
The traveler jumps to his feet, clambers down the rock and, pausing only to put his boots on, runs down the bank of the river — toward the island and then past it.
There, where the branches of the river meet, he finds his walking stick unharmed.
Thanks for reading.
[1] The line comes is from the “Open House For Butterflies”, by Ruth Krauss.
