Row, Row, Row Your Boat
Journal Entry: Saturday, August 20, 2022
“Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream”
classic nursery rhyme
Most of us learned this secret mantra as children. It first showed up in print in 1852. It’s author is unclear but possibly the American professor Eliphalet Oram Lyte (what a name right?) who also wrote the melody as we know it today.
It is worth taking a minute to contemplate this rhyme. Imagine you’re in a boat gently rowing. You are not in the water swimming or drowning. The boat is the life you have been given and are building. The rowing is the effort you put in to, not only to propel your boat, but just as much to navigate the stream, and you are going with the stream, not against it. You’re not just sitting there going adrift. You are participating in your life. And where do all streams lead? Eventually to the ocean which is a powerful symbol with many possible meanings. That you are rowing gently and not frantically means that you are calm, relaxed, purposeful, self-restrained. You are rowing merrily which suggests that you are accepting your life, enjoying it, appreciating it as you row with the current. Life is all about attitude. Then comes the declarative: ‘Life is but a dream’ and if life is nothing but a dream then why be anxious, why take things too seriously? Why not make it what you want it to be? It is just a dream.
An older, retired man by the name of Art (from Arthur), one of my Sufi teachers when I was in my early 20’s told me that the main thing he learned in life is that life is just a fluid dream in the Divine Mind, and it can be molded and bent into whatever you can imagine. So, dream well.
“Everything you can imagine is real.” —Pablo Picasso
Imagination is a very powerful and essential tool of the creative lifestyle. This is the well from which you draw your creative life, not just to make art but to make your life into what it could be.