A simple metaphor

I’ve been reading a lot about privilege, gender, and colonization. I will not even try to pretend to be an expert in this area. But I was thinking about how I am often unaware of my own life and its privilege and the role of luck and chance in all of our lives. The following metaphor / parable is what I came up with. It’s a bit of a clumsy analogy, but I thought it worked on a simple level for me.

We are like rivers

A river flows in the direction that it flows because of many things. Although some rivers are fast, or slow, or deep, or wide, they are all made of the same water. And really, a river is nothing more than water flowing along a course that was created by the water that came before it: the water that created the channel, the water that created the canyon, even the water that is downstream, pulling the river along its course.

The river doesn’t know this. It cannot know the struggles of the earlier river-water that moved the rocks. It cannot know the ease with which the earlier river-water flowed down an unobstructed path. It cannot know that the earlier river-water was obstructed and damned or if a melting glacier helped the earlier river-water to speed its course and deepen its channel. It cannot know that all rivers eventually stop flowing and that all river-water becomes part of the same sea.

All the river can know is it that it is flowing now: flowing quickly or flowing slowly; constrained or unconstrained, oblivious to its own history even as its present course and identity are shaped its history.

We are like rivers in this way. We flow along in our lives, making progress, confronting obstacles, and not always knowing the full context of our our life course.

We should try to understand

But we can try to know more that the river knows. Even as we try to live in the present, we can try to understand how the past shaped the channels and canyons of our life-course. We can see how our current circumstances might make it easier or more difficult depending on the obstacles that previous generations faced. We are the beneficiaries to the sometimes arbitrary circumstances that favoured or did not favour those who came before us. We may also carry the burden of the circumstances imposed on those who came before us. Those of us whose lives flow though clear cut channels may not always realize that we’re travelling a path with fewer obstacles, because those obstacles were removed long before us. We receive these benefits, earned or unearned, aware, or unaware.  But people whose paths are or were constrained or obstructed are often all too aware of the impedance. And like a river that was once blocked or dammed, the effects of the obstruction can be seen and felt long after the impedance was removed.

But we’re all the same river-water, flowing to the same sea. But we don’t all take the same course. We would do well to be aware of our privilege and to understand that we may not all have the same course to travel…but we still have to travel to the same place.

Be mindful of your own trajectory. Be mindful of others.

And help when you can.