Flow

I've been reading Tuesday's with Morrie by Mitch Albom lately. I love it. It's a different writing style, but the point is so clear. It's about an old college professor, Morrie, who is dying of ALS and his student, Mitch. Morrie is a teacher to his last breath and is using his death as his final lesson to Mitch, and everyone. Last night I read a section that really struck me. Morrie was talking to Mitch about how people are always seeming to want more, more is good, he called it. He precedes to list all the material things that society views as allowing for a good life. But they're all wants, not needs. And he mentions how weird people can get when you don't believe the way they do about material things and how it's our culture to follow a certain pattern. It inspired me to write this poem.

Flow

If life is like a river
And each life a droplet in the river
Both big and small
We know that the current takes us where ever we are going
Were ever that is.

But one may care to ask,
Is this current taking me where I want to be?
What if I don't like where I end up?
What if it isn't me?

And so the great river breaks off into little streams
With their own flow
And their own destination

And I wonder if
the little droplets who chose to go
into the stream
look back the way they came
and wonder if they made the correct choice

And I wonder if
the many droplets who stayed
Look towards the stream
and wonder what the little droplets were thinking.

I can change the flow, perhaps.
I will choose my unknown.
I don't need to be the same
As the other droplets.
I can be different.
I can make a difference.

And the large droplets
Who stayed behind
Laugh at the little droplet's dreams.
"You can't change the world"
"You're only one little droplet"

"The river could spit you out
against the sandy banks
And let the sun evaporate you.
And who would miss you?

But what the large droplets
Who stayed behind
Do not know
Is that if that little droplet
is thrown
Off into the unknown
It will encourage grass to grow.

And that grass will sustain the small animals
And the small animals sustain the large.
And the large will sustain the man.
and he will continue the cycle
That would otherwise be broken
Except that one little droplet
created it's own flow.