Let The Water Run Where It Runs!

Several years ago, I was sitting with my father in his living room. It was in the afternoon, and we were just enjoying the moment of being together. We didn’t have an agenda nor were we in a hurry to finish the visit. He was in his early 90s. As part of our conversation, he shared some advice about how he lived his life. His comment didn’t surprise me but rather reinforced what I already knew about him but what he said was meaningful and valuable to me, so I wrote it down to share with others. He said that he followed a simple personal philosophy which was to “let the water run where it runs!”


As he told me this, I started thinking about him growing up on a farm in Afton, Wyoming, where they had to irrigate the crops. The water was shared with other farmers below their farm, so they only had a limited amount of time to finish the job. I thought about how he would have dammed the main ditch so the water could be
channeled into the correct field where they wanted to irrigate. 

They had to take advantage of the time when they had the water, which meant they frequently had to get up in the middle of the night and change the dam. He knew that if he didn’t use his time wisely his crops would suffer. He also knew that once he got the dam in place and the water started overflowing the banks of the ditch he
couldn’t control where it went, and he couldn’t worry about it. Why? Because he had enough knowledge to know that he did his best in channeling the water and therefore the water would do its job and the crops would grow.


This statement would have been confusing if I didn’t understand a little bit about his background as a farm kid. The context in which he used this phrase would have been lost. He was telling me that like his experience irrigating the crops, he could control so much but in reality, where the water spread on the field. All he could do was provide a way for it to reach the crops. Dad was not telling me that he lived his life without direction or guidance, wandering hither and thither, but rather he was saying that his personal life grew from the symbolic self-irrigation he adopted for his life.


As a result, he tried not to worry about those things he couldn’t control, and he worked hard to control those things that he could. For example, he couldn’t control what people thought of him, so he developed a standard of living he thought was best for him and lived according to his personal plan and the life goals he set for himself. He recognized that all he could control was his attitude towards the challenges that came his way.


He knew that his life was grounded in the teachings he received from his parents and the decisions he made about how he was going to live his life. As I thought about this simple analogy, I realized that helping our children develop this same philosophy and “let the water run where it runs” was an important resiliency skill that would be forever useful in their life.