Row row row your boat
Gently down the stream
Twenty years after having learnt this poem, I have finally begun to understand what it’s been trying to say- or at least what I think it has been trying to say. You have to look closely, the clue is subtle, the word is gentle.
Row row row your boat
*Gently* down the stream
“It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender.” -Jenny Holzer
I've made a seemingly unlikely yet obvious in hindsight connection between what Jenny has to say and the writer of this nursery song. I spent a good amount of time thinking that it is about the continued rowing, how life is ceaseless, as our efforts at surviving through it must be. As I grow up a little more everyday, I am convinced that the rowing itself is arbitrary, a necessity of life, rather mundane. We’ve been paying attention to the wrong word.
To do it gently is where magic can be created.
To do it gently is the more significant thing.
To find a way to be very tender, to do things as if every move mattered, to do them with the propensity of someone distinctly aware of the most sublime changes within them, the effect of those moves on the outside.
To make space to be moved, to rearrange the furniture in the living room of your heart such that there is a place for new music, new people, new words that pierce us beyond the intellect. To row your boat is like breathing, survival is innate- it will happen one way or another. Essential processes will take care of themselves, our only job is to be gentle with ourselves, with those around us. To feel pain when it asks to be felt, to laugh with abandon when our heart demands it, to be confused enough to give yourself choices, to change your selection of ice cream flavor several times before you are completely satisfied, to give yourself permission to be discontent and do things to remedy that. To be angry and to forgive, the liberty to feel everything as if it were your first time encountering emotion, even at the cost of the boat being still for a day or two. To pay attention to those things that look you in the eye, challenging you to go to places where the shore isn’t visible, where your existence is infinite.
Be gentle, the rowing will happen naturally. Be gentle with intensity- the same way a person in the desert without any water still chooses to sing. The person is dying, each breath a moment closer to death and yet they sing, merrily so. We must be this person- merrily so.
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a dream~
A note on the limitations of language:
Gentle.
You know the word gentle in proportion with your experiences with that feeling. I could describe the word with the most intricate details and yet- the boundary of your emotion is the boundary of my grip on you.
No interpretation will ever be complete. No words spoken between any two people in this world will ever reach intact, so much is lost in translation, even within the same language. Using language implies a danger of attempting to say the unspeakable, it implies the transversal of a seemingly harmless word across lives.
How do you understand gentleness?
Gentle- in a way that you would lean over the side of a coffin or breathe upon a drying rose. Gentle as the flicker of eyes when the silence is about to be broken, gentle as the brush of a hand against innocent skin or a leaf twirling upon the waters, without breaking its placid surface, gentle like a flower after years of being pressed into a diary. Gentle as the squeeze at the end of an embrace or the hovering pen over a crisp white paper. Gentle as the hand that puts food on your plate or a pat on your unsuspecting back. Gentle as the sorrow that visits like oblique sunlight or a candle that flickers with as much as an eyelid closing.
Whatever gentleness you can conjure in your heart, you must manifest in your life.
~
Postscript//my potential glass slipper Cinderella moment
“We’re in the same boat.”
Why are we in a boat? What are we doing? Are we rowing to somewhere, or away from somewhere? Is it a cruise ship or a ferry? Wouldn’t it just be easier to go with the currents? Are we in the same boat, really?
Of course I never asked any of these questions. The idea of companionship on this boat was too tempting to destroy it with doubt.
Fine, we’re on a boat. I suppose we must row it. Keeping afloat is the nature of its body, what is the nature of those aboard? To be gentle, to be gentle, to be shatteringly gentle.
If we’re all rowing away, how lovely would it be to be in the same boat, even if for just a little bit.
This connection I found in the most unexpected of places- if you recognize the text format, you know where. If you’re reading this R, this piece is for you, your vulnerability, your willingness to be seen and to be touched by words. You moved me in a direction I did not know I could be moved. This encounter, fleeting, not feeble, has warmed something in me. Your admittance of your most human needs found a place in my own.
Comments