On a sunny morning, I sat near the end of a train to Philadelphia and meditated. I was sitting on the north side of the train looking across the aisle through the south window. Eastern Lancaster County farm country spread out in my field of vision framed by the horizontal window and the tall seat backs on the opposite side of the train car.
In the guided meditation we were told to see life as a river flowing past. From my framed perspective a very green world flowed past. Sometimes that world was nearly still, as when a field of young corn spread far out from the window with a red barn and white farmhouse a half-mile away at the far end of the field.
A moment later the train passed between two embankments. The trees and shrubs near the track were a multi-hued blur of many greens and browns and yellows. Then the train passed over a bridge and the view was of the tops of trees in the creek valley below.
The view I saw, like a river, was in one way almost eternal. The passengers on the first trains to Philadelphia from Lancaster more than a century ago saw trees and farm fields and barns and horses and fences spreading on either side of the train.
And yet, those farmers and horses passed away generations ago. The trees along the tracks and at the edge of the farm fields are different trees than those lining the tracks in the 19th Century. As with a river, things that appear the same are very different just under the surface. Since 1994, I have made the trip to and from Philadelphia thousands of times. Most of that time I would have thought nothing changed along those tracks. But both the landscape and I have changed over those 30 years.
As I write, 25,970 days of my life are behind me. The river of life keeps flowing in my life and in the world outside the window. The world changes, I change. My senses only connect with the world and my own physical life in the current moment. All the rest is memory and anticipation.
I know life can change radically in a moment, and yet as long as I am alive, there will be a continuity, like a river, flowing.
