My Love for Rivers
and Why I Think We Should Be More Like Them
When I have nothing to do and the mood strikes me, I often boot up this erosion simulator called Terra Firma. In it, you create a mountainous island and set some parameters for what types of stone are present and how much rainfall each season will get, among other things. I’ll have a glass of wine, listen to music, or write while I watch the simulated water gather in lakes among the snowy peaks and, once it fills up enough to escape the depression it settled in, slowly cut valleys into the mountain as a river, carrying the stone and soil that make up their bodies back to the sea layer by layer. After a while, a range of mountains will become a cluster of hills and then plains thereafter. I will never get sick of that moment where, before my eyes, the mountain I once saw and knew has been transformed.
Rivers are by far my favorite natural features, and I’ve been sure of this for some time. Whether I am on their banks in person, looking at their root-like shape on a map, or watching them unfold digitally, I can’t get enough of them. There is more, though, that I see in rivers than just this material process, more than this systemic beauty. What I see is something I wish for us, as people, as living beings, to emulate. I genuinely believe that rivers, and all other things in the natural world, can teach us to find peace and to lead happier lives. First, though, indulge me in exploring what a river is. That will be essential to get what I mean here.
The obvious answer to the question, “What is a river?” is that it is naturally occurring, flowing water. Whether it comes from the high valleys of a mountain, a lake, or some other source, that is what it is at first glance. So, it’s water. A bunch of free-flowing water molecules and whatever they might pick up along the way. Answer me this, though: What is a river without the land it cuts through? Imagine it for me—really.
It is simply water. There is no flow because that would require a slope, and there is no shape because that would require a container. It is merely water floating in space. Few would call that a river. It’s more like a big burst of rain at that point. And, of course, that isn’t to say that the land through which the water would flow is a river either. That’s just land, isn’t it? And as the land forms the flow of the water, like I said before, the water forms the land, carving wrinkles on its face like time does to ours. So, then, what makes a river a river is water, but it’s just as much the land. If either were to disappear, the river would not exist. So too is that the case about you and me. If there were no land, there would have never been anything for us to sprout forth from. While one might say that life started in water, one would be wise to remember that, for all we know, the only reason it could is because of the minerals and chemicals that came from the Earth floating there within. I digress, though. The specifics aren’t the point of the lesson I’m trying to tell.
As I was saying, the land is what we depend on, and, therefore, what connects us all. We all have this in common. We are one in that way. While it may feel as though we are only that which lives, what flows, we are just as much what the foundation we live upon. However, that isn’t what all rivers are either. It isn’t just a combination of the land and flowing water. For if something is in part what it springs from, a river is also the plants that grow on its bed, the animals that slake themselves from their waters, and the stones that tumble into smoothness, the civilizations that build themselves alongside their banks. So, then, one could say that a river is so many things, so many lives, so many experiences. And so are you. You are that river, and so am I. We just look a little different from what we’d expect a river to look like.
“What is there to learn from this beyond that?” one might ask. There are plenty of things, but one answer I found is my favorite: together, if you flow with me and I with you, with everything, we can level mountains.