The Voyage of Life

I imagine life as water in motion.

One day I appeared standing in a river. I didn’t see where it began. I couldn’t see where it led. The water was already moving when I noticed myself there, current brushing past my legs. I didn’t choose the river. I didn’t start it. I simply arrived mid-flow.

Above me hangs an hourglass. I can hear the sand falling, grain by grain. I don’t know how much sand there is, only that it exists and it falls. The sand doesn’t ask to be meaningful. It doesn’t justify itself. It falls because gravity exists. Because time exists.

The river is time too—but in motion. Not measured in grains, but in passage.

I learned that I don’t leave the river. Ever. Even when I step onto land, the water is still moving around it. Islands rise from the flow—places of stability, seasons of life, jobs, relationships, communities. Each island has its own rivers running through it: daily routines, conversations, habits, local time.

To reach an island, I must pass through the ocean.

The ocean is time uncontained—transition, uncertainty, the in-between. I don’t live there, but I travel through it. I don’t teleport from one life to another. I move through exposure, ambiguity, and change. That’s how islands are connected.

I don’t return to islands once I leave them. I pass through. I dock. I meet people. I learn the customs. I stay long enough to become someone slightly different. Then time carries me onward.

The boat is what stays.

My vessel—my capacity to remain upright, to care for myself, to navigate without drowning—travels with me. The river moves. The ocean opens. The hourglass keeps falling. The boat is how I remain human inside all of it.

There will be a final island one day. I don’t know where it is. I don’t steer toward it. The river doesn’t rush there either. It bends, slows, widens, nourishes banks along the way. The ocean connects everything without urgency.

So I stand where I am—sometimes on land, sometimes in motion—listening to the sand fall above me and feeling the water move below me.

I don’t need to solve the river.

I don’t need to count the sand.

I don’t need to know the last island to travel well.

I just need to stay upright, tend my vessel, and let time carry me—chapter by chapter—through the water that is already flowing.