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All life is a flow of water, presenting and removing, messing and rinsing.  Every culture or civilization that developed in isolation has had a unique inventor.   Ancient cultures, not ones that lost technological marvels to conquerors or donated them to trade.  A unique inventor of a boat.  Sometimes a boat to move independent of water's flow and that inventor is the most unique of all, for they give the gift that is a new way of thinking, revolutionizing their culture.  And young inventors are the best inventors of all, the ones who grow old watching the new way of life they ushered in.  They're heralded as geniuses, the greatest minds of their time, and no one holds them to do anything so great or enlightened again.  It's a tour circuit, signing books and addressing conferences, asking friends and colleagues to save the letters written to them so they can one day be printed in a book.  How many times the inventor must retell the events leading up to that serendipitous moment, a fortunate, chance enlightenment.  It probably gets old after awhile; maybe only after a couple weeks, family members already roll eyes into the backs of heads privately in their minds.  More new friends, an entourage of followers, shunned by the hometown folks.  Why does the inventor build a boat in the first place?  Why do they disregard the flow of water and leave the land, what was so wrong with the world that they had to be dissatisfied and go change it?  Those are the inventors I'm talking about, the ones that can't come back.

It all starts with a boat, and others add to it and make it better.  What does the inventor grown old think?  Is all the rest of life somehow anti-climatic?  Was their purpose in life to experience the single enlightenment to change the world?   This wasn't fun to write, and more than anything, I wish it would rain and for a boat to sail across this creek.


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