The mouth of the river

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

TRANSITIONS in life do not occur in abrupt phases. You do not suddenly become an adult at a given age, or become senior at another age. These are benchmarks that make it easier for others to understand and make appropriate measures to address common concerns of a particular cluster. In reality, we transition to these stages at varying momentum, so that two women who are both sixty years old, may engage in different activities depending on the energy and circumstances of their lives. One may suddenly feel retired and stay at home, the other may still be running marathons.

The clustering that assigns the stages of a person’s life from infancy to senior adulthood is not true for everyone. Even countries and international organizations differ in their assignment of age brackets for the youth.

I would liken the transitions of life as a continuous flow, and does not stop flowing at the juncture of geographical or political subdivisions. A river traversing La Union flowing to parts of Pangasinan, does not make its journey consciously thinking that it should behave differently as a result of its present location. It is just passing through a natural route, at its own speed, unless disrupted by sudden unforeseen events, or natural conditions that make the river behave differently.

Each one of us will travel through this life at our own pace, despite the normal expectations of what we can do at a specific “stage” as determined by law or prescribed by international organizations. What matters is how one is engaged in the journey, to ultimately make whole and unify our existence with the larger reality of which we are an integral part of.

 

At the mouth of the river

when water outflows

from the mouth of a river

at a point where

it meets the standing water

of a calm sea

deltas are born

and estuaries

slowly shifting

appearing and disappearing

and sometimes moving

quickly and subtly

with the passage of time

 

with the nutrients of the soil

and the minerals of the seawater

and the constancy of the sun

a new existence evolves

different from its life

at the mouth of the river

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