A river’s downward progression is inevitable. Same with the movement of the ocean and the melting of the glaciers and the landing of the rainfall that feeds all of them.

Water will progress downward using the next easiest path. Not the absolute easiest – if that were true, the river would draw a straight line. Instead, when presented with an obstacle, it moves around it in the best way for that particular place.  

Funny, I feel like I do the opposite. Think ahead, consider all options, mull about them, wonder if I made the right decision. But the river both creates and goes with the flow. It practices every moment and all the time, whether its riffles are lit by the sun or the moon.

I am out of the practice of flow. I don’t do well returning to the stream when launched from an underwater stone, no matter how smooth the edges of the rock may be. When I was in the forest on a trail that took the creek’s pathway up the canyon, the sound of its movement should have been calming and peaceful. Instead, I was fighting for each footstep.

I was training for a trail running event and had more miles to go than I had covered. The “why” and “how” drumbeats of doubt were deepening by the footstep. The numbers on my watch weren’t ascending at a rate that matched my perceived effort.

Then the words came into my head: “I am inevitable” and my shoulders loosened. I know it’s a strange thing to think and an even stranger thing to say out loud to a forest in which you are the only human occupant for some miles. The river babbled but not in response to me, only doing what it does and letting me decide how much wisdom to take from it.

I told myself, I’m just like the creek. My finishing this trail will be an outcome as inevitable as water tumbling downhill. The miles still didn’t go fast, but there was something else to say when they didn’t. After the turnaround, the creek chattered in my other ear.

I fell apart and piece myself back together in a fern-carpeted, moss-draped, tree-shaded forest threaded by a stream.

It is inevitable, I said, and so am I.