On water, resilience, and the life that keeps flowing
The river has always held a special meaning for me.
Not just its beauty, but the way it flows unendingly onward, without memory of what came before, without dread of what’s coming. It simply flows, and it was flowing long before any of us arrived here, and it will flow long after we’re gone.
The river doesn’t resist the rain. It receives it — sometimes gently, in the slow quiet of an October afternoon, and sometimes in the full fury of a monsoon. It swells. It rushes. It overflows its banks. And then, given time and space, it returns to itself. Not the same as it was before, but flowing onward, continuing on.
In this way, the river is a mirror for us.
When something pollutes the water
In 2015, a mining accident near Silverton, Colorado released three million gallons of toxic wastewater into the Animas River. Within 24 hours, this turned it a bright orange. Those of us who love that river were filled with grief at the thought that it was irreversibly damaged.
But rivers have always healed themselves.
Within weeks, scientists began documenting the return of life. The water continued to move, and as it moved, it diluted and cleared. The sediment settled. The fish came back. It didn’t hold the pollution inside itself forever, it let it move through.
I ‘ve seen this so often in people who have survived something they weren’t sure they could survive.
A diagnosis. A betrayal. A loss so heavy it changed everything about who they thought they were and what the world was. A trauma that made the world feel permanently unsafe.
Here’s what I’ve come to know: we can let things move through us. We don’t have to pretend it didn’t happen, to power through it or demand that we get over it within a certain timeline. But to eventually — sometimes slowly, sometimes in our own private way that no one else can see — let the current carry what we can’t hold anymore.
The current that replenishes
Water holds many forms. It falls as rain, flows as river, rises as cloud, and falls again. It is in constant renewal, constant return.
Our lives have this rhythm too, even when we can’t see or feel it.
There are times when everything feels still and depleted and you wonder if your life force will ever come back. And then something shifts. Maybe it’s a conversation, or a morning with light in it that you hadn’t expected. Or maybe a small act of kindness from a stranger. Slowly, the life force begins to return.
What I’ve witnessed is that the people who emerge renewed through the hard seasons aren’t the ones who were strongest or least affected, but they’re the ones who allowed themselves to stay with the current, who kept moving, even slowly. Who found a way to keep themselves connected with the flow of life.
And that’s all that life requires of us. Not perfection, but just the willingness to stay and keep moving.
Riding the storms without drowning in them
There’s a difference between being in the storm and being the storm.
Water in a storm can get dark and rough and nothing about it looks peaceful. But beneath the surface, even in the worst of it, there is a deeper current present. Beneath all of the whitecaps and the noise, the river still knows which direction it’s going.
We have this in us, too. Even when everything in our life is chaotic — the grief, the fear, the diagnosis, the darkness — there’s something beneath all of it that doesn’t break. It might be called resilience or the soul. But I’ve come to think of it as the part of us that’s older and wiser than our current suffering.
Every hard season you’ve survived is water that has already moved through you. It shaped you and it probably changed you. But you are still here, like the river, flowing through your life.
What this means for healing
If you’ re in the middle of something right now that feels like it will never clear — I want you to know that the river of life doesn’t need help to keep flowing. It simply flows. That is what rivers do.
You don’t need to fix or help the river, but just to stay beside it, to trust the current even when you can’t see around the bend.
Find something that replenishes you. What’s your rain? What fills you back up when your life force is low? Oftentimes it is the simple things, a quiet morning, listening to the bees in the garden, feeling the softness of your pet’s fur, or gazing at the stars in the night sky.
Trust the river. You may not be able to see your own healing right now. But just as a fish can’t see the ocean when it is swimming inside the water, sometimes we only recognize the clearing when we are through it and look back.
And remember: You’re not the grief, or the pain, or the betrayal, or the illness. You are the river.
What happened — the hard thing, the traumatic thing, the season that changed everything — has passed through. It isn’t what you’re made of. You were here before it came into your life. And you’re still here, moving forward, in the way that water always does.
Here’s to the river in you — still running, still finding its way.
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