I was looking for exactly this photo the other day, and was delighted when I found it in my library – but I didn’t take it. My daughter, Amy, did. I’m pretty sure I’ve taken photos exactly like this in the past but it must be back to the days of 35mm film because I can’t find any in my digital library. This is a view of part of the River Forth, at Stirling, and it shows beautifully how the river twists, turns and curves around so much at this point in its journey.
I picked up a couple of little books by a French author, Olivier Clerc, when I was in Biarritz fairly recently. One is called “La Grenouille qui ne savait pas qu’elle etait cuite….” (which is about the frog who didn’t know she was being boiled) and the other is “Rien ne peut empecher la riviere de couler…..” (nothing can prevent the river from flowing. In both books, this Swiss author, writes about life lessons he’s learned by taking an analogical perspective on natural phenomena. He argues that as well as thinking analytically, which we are encouraged to do all the time, we should also develop the skills of thinking analogically. That in doing so we will find life itself becomes richer, deeper and more meaningful. I think he’s absolutely right.
The first essay in the second of those books is about how a river can be viewed two ways – first of all, you can see that it twists this way and that (just like the River Forth in this photo), and that if you trace the course of a river from where it starts in the mountains, you find that there seems no logic to its path – it heads west, perhaps, then south, then east perhaps and so on. It disappears at times, flowing into a lake, only to reappear out the opposite side, or into a marsh, or even below ground, before re-emerging perhaps many miles further on. And yet, we call the river by the same name along this twisting, turning, ever changing path. But there’s a second way to look at the river, and that’s to take a lateral slice through the landscape and see that, at every single point, the water is flowing downhill. At no point does it ever, ever turn around and start to flow uphill. It just doesn’t. It continues from Spring to Ocean, in a constantly downhill direction. He points out that these two views of the river show both continuity (as it flows through the landscape) and coherence, as it heads constantly downhill to achieve its goal of reaching the ocean).
He draws several lessons from this, not least being that behaviour is often hard to understand because we see it superficially, and that, we need to look beneath to see the underlying motivations, values and goals, in order to understand why someone is acting the way they do. He says this teaches us to be humble, to accept uncertainty, and to inspire us to look below the surface, to better understand others. What are the coherent threads that run through an individual story, be that of a person, a group within society, a culture, or even a nation? What lies beneath the apparent randomness, the veering this way and that, over years, and decades, that actually reveals the core beliefs, values and purposes?
I like anything which inspires me to pause and reflect. And I think learning to look at the natural world analogically can really deepen the joy of everyday life.
Oh, and just before I leave……I’m suddenly remembering a line from John O’Donohue –
“I would love to live like a river flows,
carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.”
Heroes Not Zombies 