Dedicated to those whose lives ended sooner than they should have - and to those of us still learning to notice the current while we are carried by it.
Foreword
I was speaking to an ex-colleague some time back when it suddenly hit me that her eldest two are now 16 and 13. In my mind, they were still 6 and 3.
How time flies.
It's not the first time I've had this experience, of course. Every time I look at my nephew, it seems like only months ago that I could carry him easily, that he would fall asleep contentedly in the crook of my arm. Reconciling that memory with the reality - that he is about to turn 9, a boisterous, imaginative boy with limitless energy, almost 150cm tall and who handily outeats me - is really quite jarring.
I look at my parents, my aunts, my uncles. They now carry the unmistakeable marks of passing time. Somewhere along the way, without announcement, they became old.
And as I age myself, I feel the pull of time more insistently - less an abstract idea, and more as a steady undeniable current.
These moments, these thoughts, these small reckonings... I felt the need to write them down. To process them. And so I did. And like so many pieces of my writing, it remained a draft. For months. Years.
Then a few months ago, I lost a friend from boarding school to cancer. I say "I" lost, but really, the world lost. Her passing became the impetus to return to this unfinished piece and finally see it through.
I've struggled with this decision to publish for months. I don't know if it feels right to dedicate this to her memory. This is not some grand work deserving of that honour. Maybe it doesn't need to be.
Morning
The more I reflect on life, the more it seems to resemble a river, with time moving like the current.
At the beginning, it meanders - a slow, shallow stream. Days stretch out endlessly. Morning feels like an entire lifetime. You wake up, journey across vast lands, meet and befriend fearsome warriors and powerful witches, and together defeat terrifying monsters on a grand adventure to save the world. And somehow, you're done before lunchtime.
There is still so much day left.
Enough time to explore the haunted house two streets down with your neighbours. To hike over the nearby hill into the next town. To fight a fierce territorial war against the kids from the next neighbourhood over who had dared to encroach on your playground.
Time is abundant. Limitless. Almost inconsequential. You do not measure it so much as you inhabit it.
Lunchtime
Lunchtime: you catch your reflection in the window. You are no longer a child, but not yet an adult. Something has shifted, quietly and without ceremony. The gentle stream has become a small river. The water still feels calm, familiar even, but there is movement now - a steady, barely perceptible current pulling you forward.
But you don't notice it at first.
School days blur into semesters. Summers feel shorter. First loves arrive and leave. You begin to trade imagination for expectation, curiosity for competence. You learn how the world works, or at least how it expects you to work within it.
And somewhere in all that moving forward, people drift. Friends who once shared your stream find themselves in different channels - carried by their own currents, their own urgencies. You tell yourself there will be time. To write. To visit. To close the distance that has quietly opened between you.
The river flows gently on. Patient. Unrelenting.
Mid-Afternoon
Mid-afternoon arrives quietly. You snap out of a moment's daydream. The spreadsheet staring back at you isn't going to solve itself. In the distance, you hear laughter - high, bright, unburdened. Your young children are outside in the yard, vanquishing monsters, saving kingdoms, negotiating alliances with sticks and stones and boundless belief.
For a moment, you want to go to them. To join them. To roll in the grass and enter their world.
But the afternoon is busy. Meetings to attend. Key Performance Indicators to meet. Responsibilities that insist on your attention. And so, with a quiet sigh, you turn back to the screen.
The work is still waiting.
Evening
Evening comes faster than you realise. You finally look up, work complete, and stand slowly, cautiously. Your neck protests first, then your shoulders, then your lower back - each reminding you of how long you have been still. How much time has passed unnoticed.
You walk down the hallway past the children's bedrooms. Doors ajar. Quiet now. And in the shadows, barely visible, hang old posters on the walls - shelves lined with trophies, books, half-finished dreams. The echoes of a million kingdoms once saved.
Years have passed. Those former heroes grew up. They moved out. They built lives of their own. Staring at spreadsheets, striving to build families, to meet expectations, to keep up with the current.
The house is quiet. The river has been running all along.
Night
Somewhere along the way, you realise the river has changed again.
The water is no longer calm. In the moonlight, the riverbank feels impossibly far away. The current is strong, unwavering, unyielding. What was once gentle is now insistent.
And with sudden clarity, you realise: you are no longer drifting. You are being carried.
The river has become rapids. The speed is breathtaking.
You sense something ahead - a roar beneath the surface. Distant. Unmistakeable. You know what it is, even if you cannot see it.
The waterfall.
Maybe you start to swim hard against the current. Or perhaps you stop resisting altogether. Either way, the river does not slow.
You look around. And notice some of them are gone. Not drifted. Gone. The current took them somewhere you cannot follow, and the distance that once felt temporary is now permanent, sealed, irreversible. All the times you thought: we should catch up properly. Soon. When things settle.
But things never settle. The river and its current do not wait for you to be ready. It never slowed for them either - not for the ones with so much left to do, not for the brilliant ones, not for the ones still mid-sentence when the waterfall took them.
One moment, you were splashing in a shallow stream without a care in the world. The next, you are rushing toward the edge, the horizon dissolving into mist.
This is when you realise how much of life has already passed. How often you moved through your days on autopilot. How many moments were deferred, postponed, sacrificed to an idea of later that never quite arrived. How often you followed a script handed to you - study, work, fit in - without stopping to ask if it was truly yours.
And how many people you let drift, quietly, without meaning to - telling yourself the current would bring you back together.
It doesn't.
The tragedy is not the waterfall.
The tragedy is how rarely we looked around while the river was still calm. How rarely we crossed it - toward each other.
Dawn
And yet.
Beyond the waterfall lies the ocean.
The river does not end there; it transforms. The waters that plunge into the vastness are no longer separate, no longer named, no longer contained. They merge - indistinguishable, infinite. From the ocean, water rises again, evaporating into clouds, drifting unseen, falling once more as rain.
Rain that gathers into streams. Streams that become rivers. Rivers that flow back into the ocean.
The journey of the physical body may end at the waterfall. But the water itself continues. Carved by currents we never felt, people we never met - we are shaped by what came before us. And when we fall, we flow into what comes after, shaping streams we will never see.
Nothing endures. And yet nothing disappears.
The quiet invitation of this river is not to fear the current, nor to deny the waterfall. But to notice the water while we are still within it. To notice the people beside us in the current. To cross the distance while crossing is still possible.
We did not always. I did not always.
But perhaps that is why we write. Why we reflect. Why we return, again and again, to the image of the river - not to mourn what was lost, but to wake up, just a little more, to what remains.
