It is also true that you are on the shore, and it is life that is a raft on the river that you watch go by. Your participation is as an observer. You witness the passage of life.
It is easy to think that life belongs to you, that it is something you hold and push and pull, but all the while, it is something that rolls past you. It is passing before your very eyes right now. Your eyes follows its passage, and another reel of life comes into view.
There is hardly a pause between one aspect of life and another. The river of life flows, and it is seen from many shores on all sides of the bank, and seen differently. Each pair of eyes has its own story to tell.
Of course, there is some kind of consensus. There is a common vocabulary, and yet each ripple seems to be its own version rippling away.
Hello and farewell seem to be in the same breath. Each watcher on the shore is absorbed in the river, hypnotized by it. And yet, all that is happening is that a river flows by with a raft on it. Ultimately, there is no story to tell, and the river keeps flowing no matter who is on the shore looking at it. No matter who comes and goes, no matter what the weather, the river keeps moving. Even though you are on the shore, you feel that you are moving with the river. Its flow pulls you, and yet you watch from shore. Only your eyes can follow it.
While you are on the shore watching life take its course, why not have a picnic on a blanket? The river will flow, and you can enjoy it while you munch on potato chips.
Life is like an art museum. You can walk by all the paintings and admire them, whatever their subject. Art is art. Art is not dependent upon the subject of it.
When you look at great art, you are only an onlooker, and yet, it is like you enter the painting. You enter a doorway of the painting in order to embrace the consciousness of the artist. Your experience may be exquisite. Or you may see nothing in the painting that draws you, and you walk right past it.
You may walk through a field of flowers and know the flowers are for you. You love them and pick an armful. Or your mind may be on other things, and the flowers are just there, perhaps even in the way. In either case, you walk through the flowers, and they are gone because you are somewhere else.
Or, you sit in the field, just as you sit on the shore of the river, and, soon or late, the flowers will fade and leave you there without them. Whether you stay or leave, it will be the same. It will be as if the flowers never were.
Only where you are right now exists. But even that does not exist, because this is your dream and there is no now or later or before. The river flows as in a dream, and just as you observe your dreams with your eyes closed and think you are in them, you are simply an observer on the shore of a dream. No matter how real the dream seems to you, you are only looking at it. Near or far, it is still only a dream.
Eyes open, or eyes closed, you can only watch the opening and the closing of the flower you call life.