Moment by moment, year by year, we make our choices and focus on what we feel is most important. If we don’t watch out it is possible that trivial things will come to dominate the center our attention, while matters of consequence are left to bob around at the periphery.
From time to time, long ago I walked along the Niagara River, heading with the current toward the falls. I remember it as a beautiful, wide-open place. Everywhere you looked you could see the horizon and the sky. It was freedom. Relief from classrooms, offices, cars, buildings and city streets – from what seemed to us to be the natural habitat of humanity.
The river defied convention. It was slow, calm and wide. Boats sailed on it. It was so broad and still that from where I walked it looked like a lake.
There was no sign of the falls at the beginning of the trail. You couldn’t see, standing at the edge of the water, that the riverbed collapsed. That the water dropped away, just up ahead. It looked like the river would flow on forever.
If you were cruising in your boat on the river, you were sure to check your fuel. If you were sailing, you stayed alert in case a rising wind might carry you downstream past your point of no return.
Although everybody knew about it, you couldn’t see, until the last minute, the mist, like a summer cloud, rising above the water up ahead. By then, if you had drifted too far, with the falls barreling towards you, you could feel the gathering turbulence, distant thunder throttling up to a roar as you approached the erupting cataract, the landscape vanishing before your eyes, panicked by the irresistible force of the water, as it changed in a heartbeat, from playground to catastrophe.
But looking out from the path as we walked along the river, we could clearly see what was coming. Walking along, only six or eight feet above the level of the river, you could see the falls with your own two eyes. No need to rely on intuition, rumor, science, inference or the reports of people you trust. You could see it for yourself. You couldn’t see into the falls, your eyes couldn’t pierce the veil of spray, you couldn’t tell exactly what was going on there, but you could see the river boil, writhe and disappear.
A little closer, from a little higher up, you could see a lot more: the crashing pandemonium, the jagged rocks appearing, vanishing and reappearing under the deluge, as implacable as time, far below.
Take a few more steps. You could see, a little further downstream, the river somehow recombobulated itself. The same water, reassembled, followed the bend in the riverbed, took another turn, like water has since the beginning of time, and flowed on, restored, at peace.
My friends and I enjoyed the spectacle from a distance. Safe and sound. Aesthetic. Part of someone else’s story. Nature, as natural disaster and natural wonder. Aristotelian tourism. A helpless navigator, confident, complacent, surprised, terrified, crushed and broken up. A lost swimmer, or a fish. A fool on a raft or a thrill seeker in a barrel.
A world witnessed, lived and left behind.
A place that showed our own world in a new light, even before we returned to it.
More tomorrow on the way our mind training extends our karate training.
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Post Copyright © 2024 Jeffrey Brooks
Photo by flickr via Pexels
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read True Karate Dō by Jeffrey Brooks
“One of the best books I’ve read in years, inviting and compelling. Jeff Brooks moves effortlessly from martial arts to Buddhism to consciousness studies, self-transformation, and related fields in this wide-ranging and Illuminating study that has much to offer both novice explorers and veteran practitioners. A splendid achievement.”
— Philip Zaleski, Editor, The Best Spiritual Writing series