Sometimes the answer is water

Because water is the essence of you

“In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans.”
–Kahlil Gibran

When little makes sense, and the world feels oppressive, and you have a mild headache too, you might need to return to your essence. Sometimes the answer is water.

And yet.

Humans obsess over fire; totem of creation and conquest. We huddle close to its forms—the flame, the electron, the factory—longing to merge with its warmth. Civilization is a relay of torches since Prometheus, passing the flame that sustains life. But the business of fire's fabrication can make one forget his own ancestry.

You are water. A sac of liquid with a passport. You need water to think and to live.

Put down the flame, occasionally, and pick up a glass of yourself.

You may need more than a sip. A meander through wet does something that's hard to convey in words. A reminder, perhaps, of simpler times: when your world was a sac of liquid, namely, the human around you who served all your needs. She did it without thinking, or doing, but by being.

Could the nostalgia run deeper? Before therapy, coffee, or over-night comforts, our first medicine was not a pill, but a slap of cold river against naked skin. Consider the alchemy at that turns abject fear into “actually, the water is not so bad.” The river is no warmer; the thing that changed is you.

Your body remembers this wisdom even when your mind forgets.

Call me romantic (or better yet, a Coastal Elite), but I can’t imagine life without access to moving water. A glimpse of a bay or river suffices to clear my mind, at least for an afternoon. Larger woes might call for a sheer cliff and coastline. When civilization itself is at risk, the foremost cure is flood—or so it is told.

And sometimes—when the world has worn you to transparency—you just need to cry. This is water returning you to yourself.

Every solution contains water, because water is the essence of you.

Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.A.