Fear
It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.
-Kahlil Gibran
”Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence”:
This sounds, at first, like such a forbidding statement. It speaks of closed doors, and finality.
But I find this idea so comforting, because without it, we feel that we should at least try to go back to all the good people and situations that lived and happened in the past. We experience a kind of magical thinking: if only I protest loudly or compellingly enough about this change, about this farewell, if only I make the right call, if only I travel to the right destination, if only I perform the correct ablutions: then things can be as they once were. We know rationally that we can’t go back, but we feel as if, if only we worked at it hard enough, we could.
And all this trying, and the futility of it, is so much more painful than the letting go itself.
It also stops us from becoming the ocean.
What do you think? What has your life experience been?