Of Currents

When I was about 20 or so, I decided to get into reading. It was through a muddled mix of pretension and desire for slower media that I found myself opening books, which is to say reading Dune on my phone. I loved the development of my dilettante status, but I also really enjoyed learning about the world and myself through the books. However, even salient lessons can feel theoretical and hard to apply to life. It can feel hard to tease apart the themes in a book, but past that how do we make them useful.

At my first real job, I had a friend who was into personal development. He was 27 at the time – a wise elder to a recent college grad. So, I asked him for a book recommendation. He gave me Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, as any man has to give a boy, but he also recommended Siddhartha by Hermann Hess.

Once you get past the fact that it is a book about Indian culture written by a German man, it’s a decent read. The book follows the story of a rich young man who leaves home to become an ascetic monk in search of meaning. This search comes up short throwing him into more trials and tribulations. It has many themes about finding yourself and navigating through life. Some of these themes are shown through the main character’s struggles. Others are presented as distilled questions that the main character (and more importantly – the reader) reflect on over time. The question that has stuck with me the most from this book, and the question I intend to discuss here, is, “What is the river?”

In a lot of ways, the themes of the book feel like a map for leading a good life. Themes and lessons can be used to orient and guide you through the problems you find outside them. However, the operative phrase here is “can be used”. This packs into it a key point: the map you are given can be used if and only if you can use it. It’s obviously useless to say “You can’t use what you aren’t able to use”. But, the way that one isn’t able to use a map is apt to this discussion. A paper map offers little in the way of a “you are here” icon or a “this is how to tell which way is North”. So, it can be hard even with a well charted map to navigate a region you aren’t familiar with. It takes time spent looking between the map and the world to get any sense of what the map is trying to tell you. It isn’t as simple as lining your map up with your world and going from there. The perspectives on the map and from your vantage are drastically different. 

So, “What is the river?”  Siddhartha, after getting his life together a 3rd time, goes to work with a ferryman. This man uses his boat to Shepard people across the river by which he lives. Each day, no matter how the river flows, they take people from bank to bank. In meditation, the main character considers, “What is the river?” It’s a seemingly useless question. 

Is the river the water in it? If it were then most of your river is somewhere in the liminal space between: downstream, the ocean, and soon-to-be rain. 

Is the river all the water that has been and will be in it? Rather Buddhist of you, but I would think it reductive to define all waterways as one; well, if not reductive then cartographically useless. 

Is the river the rocks and trees and riverbeds that guide the water along? Is a mountain range a river? Maybe. 

I feel (in a way largely derived from the aforementioned book) that the river is the process of the water coming and going, rising and falling, the provided moving substrate for all the comprised ecology. The river is the flow. Any cup of water taken from the river isn’t the river. Any stone, fish, or bend taken from the river won’t disturb its being. The river is the flux of life through this slice of the world you see. 

And honestly, that’s pretty dope. I thought so when I read the book, and I think so now. Anytime I spend at a body of water is spent in reflection on this question.

Even when I first read the book, I saw that life is a river. Time is a river. Not one second makes up time. Not one moment makes a life. It is the procession of both that defines them. However, back to our map metaphor, that was about all I got. Life is a process, not an object. There is no periodic table element for fire – it is a chemical process. You can’t hold life in your hands. But, what does this at all tell us about how to navigate our lives?

I’ve been running again recently. As my stamina builds, I need to run longer and longer. My route has worked its way back around my alma mater. It’s nice in a lot of ways to see all the old buildings and reflect on all the good university times. However, it was shocking to see that all the students were children. Even the most grizzled graduate student looks so young.

I had this visceral feeling that I was not of that place anymore. I, or worse, it has moved on. I look back so fondly on my college days; to be different was disconcerting if not scary. 

This all befell me just in time to notice that I knew where I was on my map. 

What is a university?

The students? God what a paltry thing that would be. 

The professors? Egad, worse yet. 

The buildings and campus? Only insofar as that tree that fell in the woods made a sound. 

A university is a river. It is a coursing current of learners that come through and flood the grounds with presence for a time. Kirchhoff tells us that all current going in must come out. All that come to inhabit the university must soon leave. It is in this way that the university lives and breathes as the super organism that it is. 

As much as I long to be back in college, carefree and learning at breakneck speeds. I’m water. I’m not a river. As a river must flow: water must flow on. So change is not only healthy but necessary – as far as I can read the map.