When I traveled to West Virginia in August, I took two books with me. One I never opened. The other was Mark Nepo's The Book of Awakening, a year of meditations that I have opened countless times over the course of many years. As fate would have it, the entry for August 7 was exactly what I needed to read:
What We Bring Along
A river doesn't hold all the water that passes through it.
In our journey through time, we all struggle constantly with what to bring along and what to leave behind. It feels so hard to throw anything away, but if we don't, we will drown underneath a weight of our own making.
The river is a good model. It doesn't own the water that rushes by, yet it couldn't be in more intimate relationship to it, as the force of what moves through shapes it. It is the same with everything we love. In truth, there is no point to holding on to the deepest things that matter, for they have already shaped us.
The purpose of sentiment, then, is to release the powerful feelings that sleep in us. Sometimes books and cards and shells and dried flowers do this. But often we carry more than we need, seldom trusting that what these small treasures represent is already living within us. Often the most useful gift we can give ourselves is to lay our lives open like a river.
My perspective has shifted. I see everything differently. I am not dragging possessions or ideas or relationships along with me just because I am used to them being in my life. It is not only a useful gift, but it is essential at this point.
I imagine my life as a river, letting myself go with the flow, holding onto only what serves me well.
As I went to bed the night before last I realized that I was feeling happy. I don't remember the last time I felt that content and at ease.
Flowing like a river is working for me.
