aeryn

Have you ever watched a river flowing over rocks? Basically it looks like the same volume of water going at basically the same speed hitting the same rock in the same way so one would assume that the white water created by this would hold in a steady pattern. But it doesn't. It jumps. It changes. It's chaotic. There are a myriad of factors that go into creating that wave. There is a whole new form of math called chaos theory which is just beginning to try and describe very complicated situations like a river running over rocks.

Life itself is a little like that, but thousands times more complicated. No matter how we try to script it, no matter how we try to say when it gets to this point this will happen there is always something that causes an anomaly, something that changes even slightly how we think everything should work out.

So why am I thinking about chaos theory and rivers and life? Because I had hoped to write some predictability into my life. I had it perfectly scripted. I even thought I had the timing worked out well. But love, life, and rivers bounce off rocks, are pushed by the wind, influenced by temperatures, and maybe even changed by the flutter of insect wings in a distant land. And so nothing ever works out exactly the way we hope, but it does always work out. The river finds ways to keep flowing with or without us.

So the phone call came. Two days after I had decided that I couldn't stand it a moment longer. Two days after my deadline. Two days after I tried to force life to do what I wanted. And in those two days, I found hope which never seems to desert me, and a much needed infusion of empathy for the pain of others. Two days of a wave breaking over a rock in a certain pattern, which shifted with his voice to a new shape. A new shaped which I know will change again and again, and tumble wild in a joyous riot over the rocks in my life.