There are things that I know that I can remember how I learned them. My father taught me how to change a tire. When I was a teenager, before I was old enough to have a driver’s license we were going somewhere together and had a flat tire. Instead of hopping out and changing the tire, which was his usual behavior, he had me change the tire. He talked me through the process and gave me advice and helped a little by handing me tools and holding the lug nuts, but I did the work. I remember being honored that he asked me and feeling competent that he approved of my work. He taught me how to change the oil in a vehicle. He also taught me to fly an airplane. Years after he had died, when I was in a stressful or challenging situation with an airplane, I would hear his voice in my head as I worked through checklists and planned my actions.

There are other things, however, that I know, but I have no memory of how I learned them. If you swim across a river, don’t head upstream to compensate for the current. Don’t even swim straight across. Angle downstream. The flow of the river will help you swim, speed your motion, and you will end up with more reserve energy and less downstream travel than those who try to fight with the river. I am absolutely convinced that this is true. I’ve swum across the Boulder and Yellowstone rivers many times. I’ve even swum across the Missouri. But I don’t remember a teacher who gave me this sage advice.

Another river truth is this: You can run faster than the river flows if you get out and run along the shore. Even if the shore is rocky and unstable, in most cases you can outrun the river. Running in the water, however, slows you and you can barely walk, let alone speed faster than the water flow. If you drop something that floats in the water and you want to retrieve it. Keep your eye on it, get out of the water and run downstream until you are farther downstream than your object. Then you can wade out and retrieve it.

Theoretically this would work for, say a little brother, though I never really tested the theory on one. We did test it with homemade boats and sticks and other objects, however. I don’t remember ever being taught this method. It is just something that I learned by growing up next to a river.

A river has a lot to teach about the nature of life. Because we live life in motion. The world doesn’t stop so we can figure out how to participate in the flow. The days pass, our lives flow on, the world continues to turn, the seasons come and go. Everything we learn about living takes place in the midst of living.

Another river lesson. Watch the beavers. When they build a dam there are a couple of possible outcomes. Sometimes the storms come or the spring ice break up causes the dam to break. When the dam is breached, the water quickly flows through and the beaver pond turns into a stream once again. Sometimes the dam can withstand the flood and forces. In those cases, the pond begins to fill with mud and silt. After many years, the pond becomes a meadow with a stream flowing through it. Either way, the pond is temporary. The water is restrained for a while, but the essential flow of the water continues. This is true of the dams that humans build as well. The process takes more time in the case of human dams, but the river continues to flow. Water still makes it from the snow drifts high in the mountains to the Gulf of Mexico every year.

As the song reports, “My life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation.”

We live immersed in the flowing stream of life itself.

Fighting the streamflow exhausts and decreases our effectiveness.

The river that flows by the place where I grew up is a mighty one. It takes any sort of stone or rock that falls into it and rolls it around until all of its edges are worn away and the rock is rounded and smooth. High up in the mountains, the rocks are fractured by ice and the chunks have sharp edges and straight sheer lines. After being in the river for a few miles, they are rounded. Down where we lived, all of the river rocks were smooth and rounded. During flood season above the roar of the water rushing by, you could hear the clunk of the rocks being rolled over by the water and crashing against one another.

I like to think that six decades in the river of life has rounded off some of my edges as well. I think that I am not quite so harsh and grating as I was as a young man. I’m still pretty hard to my core, but I’ve developed a bit of skill of rolling with the waves of life and continuing to be me even though my place in life has shifted and continues to shift. These days I don’t have to have a lecture of words for every situation. I’ve learned that one clear word that is just right is worth a mountain of words that just go on and on. It has taken me a long time, but I am learning to listen more and speak less. That took a lot of years of trying to force my way up stream. I know that it seems obvious, but it took me a long time to learn that some of the best sermons are the shortest ones.

These days, when the time comes to say farewell to one who has died - when a friend goes ahead to a place, where for a little while, we cannot follow - I understand that he is not lost forever.

He’s just a little farther downstream than I.

Fighting the current will only wear me out.

Riding the river will bring me closer more quickly.

I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.