Travel Reflections: What Water Knows About Us

Before Carla and I decide where we want to go next, there’s one question we almost always ask: Where’s the water? An ocean, a sea, a river, a lake - it really doesn’t matter. Over the years, we’ve learned that we’re happiest when water is somewhere nearby. There’s something about that combination of power and peace, movement and stillness, that draws us in every time.

We’re not really beach people. We’re not the type to spend the day stretched out on the sand or baking in the sun. What we love is being near the water - the morning and evening walks along the shore, the constantly changing light across its surface, the sound of waves breaking somewhere in the distance. It does something to us that’s hard to explain. We slow down. We breathe a little differently. And wherever we happen to be in the world, being near the water gives us that wonderful feeling that somehow, for a while, we belong there.

I’ve spent more hours than I could count sitting beside rivers, standing along shorelines, or looking out at the sea from an old stone wall somewhere. I’m usually taking photographs, of course. No surprise there. Eventually, though, I put the phone down and simply watch, because there’s a great deal happening in water even when it appears to be doing almost nothing.

It’s always moving, gathering and breaking apart, disappearing and returning in ways we barely notice. Sometimes it’s gentle enough to rock a small boat, while at other times it’s powerful enough to reshape an entire coastline. It catches the light and changes with it, turning from blue to silver to gray and, occasionally, almost black. Water is always changing, even when it looks exactly the same. I like that about it.

What stays with me most is the realization that I’m never looking at the same water twice. A river may appear unchanged from one moment to the next, but the water in front of me has already moved on. The next wave reaching the shore isn’t made of precisely the same water as the one that came before it. What looks permanent is changing every second.

People are like that too, though we often pretend otherwise. We carry the same name for decades, look more or less familiar in the mirror, and begin to imagine there must be one fixed person living inside us. But we’re changing every day. The person who wakes in the morning isn’t quite the person who goes to sleep that night, because something has happened in between - a conversation, a disappointment, a small kindness, a troubling piece of news, or a memory that arrived without being invited. Life keeps moving through us even when we appear to be standing still.

But there’s something else about water that stays with me just as much: the way countless separate drops come together and become something far larger than any of them could ever be alone. A single drop of water seems like almost nothing. It can rest on the edge of a leaf, cling to a window, or disappear into your sleeve during a rainstorm. Put enough drops together, though, and you have the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, or the Danube making its way across Europe. The drop hasn’t stopped being water. It’s simply become part of something much larger.

Now, I have no idea whether a drop of water has any awareness of this. I’m guessing it doesn’t. It probably has no private ambitions, lingering resentments, or strong opinions about the behavior of the other drops, which may explain why water gets along with itself better than people do.

If a drop could think, I doubt it would spend much time worrying about where it ended and the ocean began. The question wouldn’t make much sense, because the drop is part of the ocean and the ocean is made of drops. You can’t really have one without the other. Human beings have a harder time understanding that.

We are deeply attached to the idea that we are separate. We have names, histories, families, beliefs, wounds, preferences, and often some very strong opinions about how the world should work. Over time, we build an identity around all of it, and then spend a surprising amount of energy protecting that identity as though it might disappear if we loosen our grip.

Some of that is natural because our individuality matters. Each of us sees the world from a place no one else has ever stood, and no one has lived through our exact mixture of joys, losses, mistakes, memories, and people who drove us crazy. Each of us carries a story that belongs to no one else. We’re one of a kind, but we’re not as separate as we like to imagine.

The same air moves through all of us, and we depend upon the same soil, rain, sunlight, and fragile systems that keep this little planet going. What happens in one part of the world eventually reaches another. Pollution doesn’t stop at a border because its paperwork isn’t in order, and neither does disease, war, hunger, fear, or hope. We’re connected whether we find that idea inspiring or terribly inconvenient.

Perhaps that’s what makes connection uncomfortable. It asks something of us. It means another person’s suffering can’t always be dismissed as entirely their problem, and it asks us to consider whether our comfort may be connected to someone else’s hardship. We can divide the world into people who matter and people who somehow matter less, but we can’t keep doing so without damaging ourselves in the process. Separation is easier. Not kinder, but easier.

So we divide ourselves by race, nationality, religion, class, politics, gender, and whom we love. We take the astonishing variety of human life and turn it into a ranking system, then stand back, look at all the anger and loneliness, and wonder what on earth happened. A drop of water would probably find us exhausting.

Imagine one drop declaring itself superior because it came from a more impressive cloud, while another refuses to mingle because the drop beside it fell on the wrong side of the mountain. A third insists that only drops of its exact color and background should be allowed into the river. There wouldn’t be a river, only a great many lonely drops, each one congratulating itself on being correct.

Becoming more connected doesn’t require us to give up what makes us different. A river doesn’t lose its character because many streams feed into it. Each one arrives carrying something from the mountains, forests, fields, or towns it passed through along the way. They bring different temperatures, colors, histories, and even smells, some more pleasant than others, yet they enter the river without forgetting where they came from.

Unity isn’t the same thing as sameness, and that distinction matters. Calls for unity are sometimes little more than demands that someone become quieter, smaller, or more agreeable. That isn’t unity. It’s control wearing nicer clothes.

Real unity leaves room for difference. It doesn’t ask us to erase who we are, but it does ask us to loosen our grip on the belief that who we are makes us more valuable than someone else. We can remain fully ourselves without turning everyone who’s different into an enemy. That sounds simple, though human beings have been failing at it for ages. Water keeps offering the lesson anyway.

Its strength comes from joining. One drop can’t carve a canyon, carry a ship, turn a turbine, or fill a reservoir, but enough drops together can change the shape of the earth. We often speak as though power comes mainly from individual achievement. We celebrate the lone genius, the heroic leader, and the person who claims to be entirely self-made, but no one is self-made.

Someone fed us, taught us, encouraged us, built the roads, grew the food, repaired the power lines, or sat beside us when our life fell apart. Even the person who insists on having done everything alone usually says it while standing on a floor somebody else built.

Our greatest power has always been collective. Nearly everything worthwhile has required people to come together. Rights have been won that way, diseases have been brought under control, and communities have rebuilt after fires, floods, and wars because people decided that something mattered more than their own comfort. Every movement toward greater justice began when people found one another and realized they could accomplish more together than alone.

They didn’t come together perfectly, of course. People rarely do. There were disagreements, competing priorities, frustrations, setbacks, and moments when progress seemed painfully slow. Cooperation is messy, but it works.

Imagine what might become possible if we truly understood that another person’s well-being doesn’t weaken us. It strengthens us. Feeding a hungry child wouldn’t be viewed as charity offered by the fortunate to the unfortunate. It would simply be caring for the larger human family to which we all belong. Making sure people have shelter, medical care, education, and a chance to live with dignity wouldn’t be considered some dreamy act of generosity. It would be common sense.

We don’t congratulate ourselves for sending blood to an injured hand. The hand is part of the body, and helping it heal helps everything. Humanity is a body too, though we’ve been slow to notice. We keep treating people as disposable and then act surprised when the whole world feels wounded.

Of course, saying that we’re all one doesn’t magically solve anything. It can become a lovely phrase that floats safely above the harder work, looking beautiful while asking almost nothing of us. We still have to make choices. Laws have to change, resources have to be shared, and cruelty has to be challenged. Some of us may even have to surrender advantages we’ve spent years calling rights.

Love without action is a very attractive idea. It looks good framed on a wall. But compassion can’t stop at feeling.

A river is a river because it keeps going. Water arrives, passes through, and makes room for whatever comes next. Compassion works much the same way. It can’t remain only a private feeling we carry inside ourselves; eventually, it has to reach another person.

I think this may be why water feels almost sacred, even to people who don’t consider themselves particularly religious. We sense something in it that we’ve forgotten about ourselves. Water doesn’t argue with the shape of the land. It moves around the rock, finds the opening, joins what’s already flowing, and continues on its way. It can be strong without always being hard.

We often imagine that strength means holding our ground, refusing to bend, and never admitting that someone else may have seen something we missed. Water suggests another kind of strength. It adapts without losing what it is. Pour it into a cup and it takes the shape of the cup; freeze it and it becomes solid; heat it and it rises into the air. Its form changes, but it’s still water.

Perhaps we could become a little less frightened of changing too. We could listen without assuming that listening is surrender, and we could allow another person’s life to rearrange the way we understand the world. We might even stop confusing separation with freedom, because a single drop may be free of the ocean, but it’s also very small.

Together, water moves around the planet. It rises, falls, freezes, melts, disappears into the earth, and turns up somewhere else. The water I watched in Chania may one day fall as rain in a place I’ll never see, while the river passing through Bordeaux may eventually reach the same ocean touching another continent.

We give it different names - river, rain, sea, snow - but it’s all water. Perhaps the same is true of us beneath all the names we’ve given ourselves.

We aren’t merely a collection of individuals who happen to be living on the same planet. We belong to one another and to the earth that made us. We’re shaped by it, fed by it, and dependent upon it from our first breath to our last. We aren’t standing apart from life, looking at it from a distance. We are life.

We’re an ocean of human beings, each of us distinct and carrying a story no one else can tell, yet none of us truly separate from the whole. We can continue thinking of ourselves as lonely drops, guarding our small boundaries and keeping the world at a cautious distance, or we can remember what water has been showing us all along.

We become most powerful not when we stand alone, but when we flow together.

That’s how we become the ocean.