Life is a highway and there is even a song about it. We are born a Hyundai Elantra, a Ford 150 diesel truck, or perhaps, if you’re lucky, a sleek and shiny Jaguar or an Austen Martin. We are born with a particular skill set. We have an engine, four wheels and a tank full of gas. Depending on the part of the world and the family you are blessed to be born into, determines the size of your engine, your gas tank, and the length and shape of the roads you’re going to travel on.
Life certainly feels and resembles a highway.
Some of us drive rather slow and some of us drive really fast. Some of us don’t change lanes properly, or they talk on the phone, and some smoke really funny stuff, when they really shouldn’t. Some people get into minor and life threatening accidents, while others are the cause of them.
Life as a highway can be measured, manipulated, influenced and controlled, to some extent, but what if life was not a highway but a long and winding river? Perhaps sometimes it moves fast and sometimes it moves slow. It is gentle and sunny one moment, and tempest like the next. Gently and slow in parts, and full of rapids and waterfalls elsewhere. What if life is a river? Does that change anything?
It does.
I think life is a river. It can’t be measured or fully embraced. A road or highway is built by human beings, a river is built by nature, and so the analogy that life is a river, fits a bit more snuggly I think.
We get a boat, an unlike a variety of cars that are more comfortable, efficient, or go from zero to sixty kilometres in under a second, a boat, no matter how big or small, flows down the same river with the same attention and the same opportunity to see and experience the river in its fullness.
Life is a river.
Life is a river and we need to get in our boat and stop manipulating or telling the river who it is and what it should be doing, and just hold tight and flow down, for as long as we are able. Through the rapids, through the sunsets, through the storms, and the rainbows. We need to fall in love with out boat, no matter how old, how warn, or how many years it has gone without a fresh coat of paint.
Life is a river, but we make it a highway.
We measure our life by standards and desire that fade and are replaced by new modern standards. We measure up to things that we don’t need to measure up to. We believe stories about ourselves and the world we live in, that we have no business in believing.
Life is a river and it makes you free. It gives you the opportunity to understand that you have infinite possibilities. That your life has deep purpose and you need to find your meaning for being. There are no right or left turns on a river. There are no green lights or red lights. There are no stop signs or toll booths.
There is only the river, your boat, and you. There are the people you wish to share your boat with, or people how have invited you on theirs. We are all floating down a river. Our lives are like a river that bends and extends through the infinite tapestry of time.
Isn’t it time you sell your car and use your boat instead?
Cover photo generously provided by photographer Petar Petkovski | https://unsplash.com/@petkovski
