What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn't have any doubt it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn't want to go anywhere else.
How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice...
Life is our teacher. Life communicates with us all the time and it is a lesson to see how life continuously has led me to the people I need to met, to the situations I need to experience, and to the places I need to be. There has never been any real reason to worry since all small individual rivers are already on their way to the ocean, to the Whole. It is not about swimming, it is about relaxing and to float with the river in a basic trust that life already leads towards the sea of consciousness, towards the Whole.
With rivers as with good friends, you always feel better for a few hours in their presence; you always want to review your dialogue, years later, with a particular pool or riffle or bend, and to live back through the layers of experience. We have been to this river before and together. We have much to relive.
He who does not know his way to the sea should take a river for his guide.
Fr., Les rivieres sont des chemins qui marchant et qui portent ou l'on veut aller.
Then the enchantment became more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him. Swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep.
-J. R. R. Tolkien The Fellowship of the Ring Book 2, Chapter 1, pg. 281
This river will teach you everything you need to learn. The water follows and trusts the current. It doesn't try to direct itself but allows itself to be pulled easily and naturally to the ocean. The current knows where its going. That's why its the current. The twigs bob merrily along the surface and trhe fish trust everything the current brings. The water is called by what is greater, the ocean, where the current both begins and ends. And this is how we are led when we trust our source and allow that source to lead us along to the fullest, happiest expression of life.
Through this broad street, restless ever, Ebbs and flows a human tide, Wave on wave a living river; Wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.