Heroes Not Zombies

This is such a common sight for me. There must be thousands of such streams, or “burns” tumbling down through the hills in Scotland. This combination of lively, gurgling water, centuries-smoothed rocks and green moss and grasses twisting this way and that is just so beautiful, so pleasing. The sound the water makes as it hurries downhill is like a magnet. When you’re out walking in the hills or in a forest this special noise draws you towards it. It’s a sort of compulsion. Once you hear it, you feel magnetically drawn towards it, to go and see it, to stand or kneel beside it, to slide your hand into the cool, clear waters.

I often wonder about the shape of streams and rivers – thinking of how it’s the relationship between the water and the earth, the rocks and soil, which creates their shape and path.

The exact shape of any stream or river is constantly changing. It emerges as the co-creation of day by day, moment by moment, interactions as the rocks contain the water and the water shapes the rocks.

Mostly the daily changes aren’t obvious but then there will be a downpour or a storm and both the size and shape of the river can change dramatically.

You can feel that power as you stand beside it. You can sense it’s potential.

When I started to think about this image the phrase, “in good shape” or “good form” came to my mind.

We say that when we mean someone is healthy don’t we? “They are in good shape” or “they are on good form”. We aren’t usually referring to their bodily statistics when we say these things. We’re thinking more of their vitality, their energy, their that slippery overused word, well-being. In short, we’re commenting on their state of health and/or their mood.

Many years ago I read a collection of essays by Hans Gadamer, “The Enigma of Health”. They made a huge impression on me. One of the points he made about health was that it involved are certain kind of fitness – not so much in the sporting sense but in the way we say something is “a good fit”. This captures the idea of comfort, ease, and something “just right”.

Hard to pin that down really but we know it easily. We know it intuitively. We sense it with our whole being.

Gadamer’s essays in that collection are all about how difficult it is to pin down that state we call “healthy”. He comments how we notice our thumb when we trap it in a door but we don’t really notice it when it’s healthy, when it’s in good shape. Strange that, isn’t it? How it’s trauma or disease which draws our attention to parts of our body, and how health, by contrast, is pretty invisible.

Thinking then of the phrase “in good shape” and looking at this photo, I get to wondering how our lives take the shape they do. That too is a constant interplay of forces and flows, of resistances and movements.

It’s both beautiful and strange.