I awake to the sound of rain on my windows. In that relaxed state between sleep and being fully awake, a familiar song plays in my head:
Row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily,
life is but a dream.
It is so clear and vivid, I feel like it is being beamed into my skull as if I’m accidentally picking up an A.M. station from a nearby town. I rarely wake up with songs in my head, and never nursery rhymes.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned a few things about the mysterious bits and bobs that show themselves at the edges of dreamland. The most important lesson: pay attention because the thing is never the thing it appears to be. There’s always more to it if you allow some space.
So I do what I’ve become accustomed to doing lately: I wait and listen.
I don’t have to wait long.
Science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein once invented a word—grok—for his novel Stranger in a Strange Land. To grok something means to intuitively “get it” or quickly and profoundly understand something. It’s an in-your-bones kind of “getting it” that doesn’t require a bunch of words.
While I listen to the rain and the words in my head, I grok Row, Row, Row Your Boat in a completely new way. Turns out, this simple nursery rhyme is the profound invitation and exact reminder I need today:
Row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily,
life is but a dream.
To explain it, I have to use more words than the simple rhyme contains. But it goes something like this.
Look around you. See how you’re being carried by the flow? It knows where it’s going and how to get there. Your destination, the ocean to which all streams return, is inevitable. One way or another, you’ll arrive. Chill.
So stop trying to row against the flow. Stay pointed downstream. Row with it, but gently. All of your hustling won’t speed your trip all that much. As important as you are, you’ll never make the stream flow faster. It’s enough to navigate around the boulders and driftwood you encounter. That paddle in your hand? That’s for steering.
And lighten up. Don’t take things so seriously. Even if you hit rapids and gnarly bits along the way (which you will), joy is always on the other side of them. If you gonna row, you might as well embrace the adventure and have a laugh along the way.
Oh yeah, and life—it’s just a story. Your story. So write one worth telling while you have this life because here’s a little un-secret secret: in truth, you’re a soul, Life Itself playing as a person, so you really have nothing to lose.
I smile. What a wonderful and childlike way to see life. To trust life. To say “yes” to it in every way that I can. Even if it’s idealistic, I don’t care. I could use a little more of that in my heart right now.
I roll out of bed. The rain is still falling outside. It’s the perfect day for living and getting on the river.
Be-ing is wonderful.❤️🙏🏼