Watching The River Flow

Recently, my days have been filled with summertime activities: playing euchre with aunts and uncles visiting from out-of-town;

riding The Beast and The Diamondback at King’s Island; playing a round of golf with my father, my visiting brother and my teenaged nephew; sitting in the top row at the Great American Ballpark with my kids on a ninety degree afternoon watching the Cleveland Indians beat the Cincinnati Reds; hosting a little league ice-cream social after my son’s team lost the league championship; going to cook-outs and parties with friends and family. When time permits, I tend to respond to the nagging responsibilities of homeownership: vacuuming the family room, mowing the lawn, washing the cars, polishing the woodwork, the list goes on and on. Oh, and when I am not heading the duties of homeownership, or involved in summertime activities, I hear the call of consumption: trips to the grocery, the shoe store, the gas station, the mall. Is it any wonder that when a few extra minutes pop up, I find myself  

involved in easy entertainment: women’s world cup soccer, Expedition Impossible, Summer Wipe Out, Major League Baseball. In the few remaining down times, it is tempting to nap, snack, and just chill. And so life goes on. And so another summer goes by. And then it’s fall. Another college football season, a new bunch of leaves to rake, a Turkey. 

I have often been dissatisfied by these seemingly endless days of activity, and thus am reluctant to allow myself to fully commit to them. For a long time I thought I maintained this aloof status because I wanted to be associated with the brooding intellectual type, but now I realize it is because 

I am afraid. I’m afraid of that rushing river that is inviting me to jump in and of allowing the current to carry me, before I know it, to the end of the road. Like Ulysses and his men, I too am tempted by the lotus eaters. I see that I could easily float. 

But, when I do jump into the raging river of life and allow myself to simply flow through a continuous string of activities and duties, I somehow think that I am not living deliberately. I am too passive. 

Although I very well might, I do not want to, as Thoreau says, come to the end of my life and discover that I had not lived. What a haunting thought indeed. I want to live a life in which I am invested in what is expansive. And yes, sometimes that means seeking out experiences, and yes, few lives are free of duty and responsibility, but I can try, I can fight, I can focus on finding moments to devote to expansion. For me, those times manifest through reading, writing, and challenging discussions.

To put this another way, it seems to me that most activity is designed to entertain us while we sit and watch it. I tend, however, to want to be the designer of my entertainment. I want to create and search for meaning. I grow tired and lethargic and bored sitting in the audience day after day. I am bothered by activities that do not encourage reflection, yet, our economy is sort of designed in a way that such activities are promoted and maybe even essential to capitalism. If we all stopped buying stuff, and stopped attending concerts and sports games and theme parks, what industry would support us? But, I do not wish to be

anti-materialistic in this blog. Henry David Thoreau wrote that message far better than I ever could. No, today’s blog is about what centers my life; it’s about pulling myself out of that river that I sometime dive into, it’s about drying off in the sun and, as Dylan sings, it’s about sometimes, just sitting here on this bank of sand and watching the river flow.