A bowlful at a time

​​I wish I’d been writing my memoir all along. 

I wish I’d begun taking notes, well, forever ago, and that I’d kept them all in neat catalogued piles I could easily reference, like a library set up for a research paper. 

I wish my memory itself was a more organized space, or at least had a more photorealistic way of capturing details.

I wish I was better at telling stories. 

Sometimes you just have to lead with the regrets, you know? Rake all that dead brown stuff up off the shoots beneath that are struggling for the light. 

Listing these wishes here, even briefly, is helping me recognize them as either unrealistic, impossible, or simply too late to alter. My only choice is to start where I am. I need to, as the serenity prayer invites, accept the things I cannot change. 

Miraculous things happen when we accept. Like, almost instantly, I was shown this: that our lives—our stories—are rivers. We’re dropped here out of the immense sky, starting out as a droplet, a trickle, a small movement, an imperceptible shift in the arc of time and space. 

As we flow along we add volume, gain momentum. We pick up debris. We move faster. We rush. We slow, bending along curves. We carve canyons. We destroy some stuff, and we feed and nourish lots else. We get filtered, get dammed. 

The river grows longer, its banks get wider, the ground it slices through grows deeper. The moments multiply and the volume of our story becomes quickly immeasurable—infinite, even—relative to our tiny, temporary selves. 

Eventually, it rejoins the vastness from which it came, this time emptying out into the ocean. 

I, the writer, the speck of ‘now’ that I am, can only stand or sit or lie in one place along the river at a time. My attempts to write the story can only ever come from that spot, that moment. Capturing a single scene is like dipping a bucket into the rapids, or holding a drinking glass under a waterfall. 

I mean, maybe I could have tracked each bend in the river, mapped it mile by mile, catalogued its properties. But how? The nature of a river is that it is never, ever still. We can sit motionless, sure, but our lives never will. Everything that isn’t right now is subject to the vagaries of memory, the heedlessness of anticipation.

So the memory I’m writing about—the 3rd grade lunch table, the broken hand, the car in the woods, the 2am phone call, the spontaneous flashback, the hike over the mountain—is colored by how I’m feeling today, what my current mood will allow me to remember about it. Like, what aspect of now-me is connecting with what part of then-me? What feels relevant about it right now, given all I’ve learned since? Given all I don’t yet know?

I’m only ever dipping a bowl into the river of my story, however placid or rushing it is that day, whatever is reflected on its surface, whatever the light is like, whatever life forms are swimming around in its depths. It’s just this. One bowlful at a time.

And you?

What’s the view from where you sit today? What’s in the bowl you scoop, the glass you fill? If you’re stuck, why not start with your regrets? Face the pile of sticks staunching the river's flow. Call to each branch by name; regard each hunk of mud with the gravity it demands. Watch how quickly they dissolve, and make way for you to flow on.

Please share your writing—or even just your thoughts—in the comments.