Recently, I was marooned on a roadside where there was—I shudder to say it—no internet connection. I was waiting for my wife to pick me up and had only my own thoughts and the scenery with which to beguile time.
The scenery was quite spectacular: ancient Wisconsin bluffs burgeoning in the background wearing the shimmering cloak of rich, high-summer greenery that glistened in the sun. The steeple of a magnificent church I had just visited broke through the distant canopy like a triumphant upraised sword, and the little road down which I’d wandered weaved its way to the valley bottom below the church, where a full-bellied stream gathered itself in a pool, tumbled around roots and log jams, spooled out, and then gathered again in the next little pool. A bridge ran over the stream, and there I stopped, leaning over its edge, to stare at the waters below.
I do not recall the last time I had so much time to do so little. It might have been in childhood, lost somewhere in the haze of long summer afternoons before all the responsibilities, schedules, logistics, and constant access to electronics that adulthood has brought with it. I remember that, then, it was possible to watch an anthill for long minutes, maybe hours, undisturbed.
Now, deprived of the distraction of all electronic gadgets, some miles from the city, unable to hasten my wife’s arrival, there was nothing to do but keep my solitary watch by the stream. It was a happy powerlessness. Time slowed. I moved from the realm of acting to the realm of merely being. I was not “someone trying to get something done,” or “going somewhere else.” I was just a human being who had stumbled upon existence, stumbled upon the world made suddenly present as it rarely ever is, marveling at its intricate beauty.
Long ago, Aristotle told us that all men desire to know, and that this “knowing” is, in some sense, the peak of human existence. He didn’t say “to do,” but “to know.” And that was all I wanted, leaning against the rail over the purling creek as an unassuming breeze nuzzled me and woke the leaves above so that they fluttered softly: to know this place, this little stream that ran on and on, miles away from me, toward the Mississippi, and then the gulf.
How many hundreds of times have I driven past a spot like this (or even that very place), thinking in passing, “that’s pretty,” and thinking I had grasped what there was to grasp of it. But I was wrong. The longer I stayed and studied the stream, the more I noticed, and so the more it became “mine”: the way small tufts of frothy foam idled down the current until they encountered an obstacle where they would slow, temporarily, as though considering, and then some would go right, but more would go left; the way the trees and shrubs formed a complex mesh that clothed the banks of the stream, suffused with sunlight; the unabated tinkling sound of the cruising water that carried on steadily, always steadily, underneath the roar of the occasional passing car.
Once, one of these cars stopped and asked if I was OK. Maybe they thought I was about to jump from the bridge in a final act of desperation (although the 15-foot drop would do no harm to me beyond a wetting). I assured them all was well. Was it really so unusual to see someone standing alone on a bridge, just studying the scene? Maybe so. I imagine that my church clothes and the book under my arm added to the strangeness.
But I did not let this brief intrusion distract me from the important thing I was doing. As I watched the suds go by, my mind drifted to Heraclitus, the forefather of so many modern errors, who famously used a river as an analogy for his philosophy that everything is in flux, always changing. To which the more common-sense philosophers replied that the water may flow on, yes, but the stream is more than mere water. It has a form to it that holds the same over time. No one in their right mind gives the Mississippi a new name every day, just because some millions of gallons of water have passed through it. It’s still the same river.
Some things remain the same, like the constant gentle murmur of the stream. Some things endure. The water of time may flow on, but all is not change. There are certain permanences we can rest in. This was a consoling thought, at the time, due to my state of mind and certain difficult matters I was wrestling with. The stream said, peace, be still.
Of course, I would not have thought these thoughts or seen these sights if I hadn’t been forced to do so. I never take the time to go sit outside and do nothing. Who has time for that? But I’m wondering if I should. The mind quiets. The eye finally sees. The ear really hears. All the world of business, the breaking news, even one’s own life problems, recede into the background.
Walker Percy wrote in his novel The Moviegoer: “The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost.” Well, that is often the case. But it was not so by that stream. I was—for however short a time—a native of the place, truly in it. I was not going anywhere. I was simply there.
The cosmic irony of slowing down to be present in the world is that it finally frees your mind to go beyond the world, to consider bigger questions than your dinner plans, your monthly budget, or even whether Trump or Harris will win in November (and, yes, there are bigger questions). It’s not so hard to imagine the experience of the early philosophers, as Aristotle describes it:
It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too, e.g. about the changes of the moon and of the sun, about the stars and about the origin of the universe. Now he who wonders and is perplexed feels that he is ignorant (thus the myth-lover is in a sense a philosopher, since myths are composed of wonders); therefore if it was to escape ignorance that men studied philosophy, it is obvious that they pursued science for the sake of knowledge, and not for any practical utility.
But in order to wonder about the changes in the moon and the like, they first had to notice them. Those philosophers first had to stop and look, hear, smell, taste, touch. That is perhaps the most important thing I was reminded of by the stream. I wonder if we could beat back the malaise—as Percy defines it—and recover something of the world if we stared at streams more.
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