In the rainy season, sometimes to get to the first lesson we had to run really quick, because we had to cross the river to school and we'd have to go up and down the bank to find a place to cross because there is no bridge.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The river is constantly turning and bending and you never know where it's going to go and where you'll wind up. Following the bend in the river and staying on your own path means that you are on the right track. Don't let anyone deter you from that.
My school was six miles away from where I lived on the farm. I had to walk and run, there and back every day, through gorges and over rivers. If I was late, there was a very big stick waiting for me.
It's hard now to imagine that kind of travel and the daily tasks they simply took for granted. If a wagon axle broke, you had to stop and carve a new one. To cross a river, you sometimes had to build a raft.
I really didn't even have time to get that many lessons, to be honest, because I was suddenly on the road. I was kind of thrown in the deep end. But that wasn't a bad thing when I look back at it.
The hardest thing in life to learn is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
To connect with the great river we all need a path, but when you get down there there's only one river.
Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.
I'm really quite simple. I plant flowers and watch them grow... I stay at home and watch the river flow.
In the fifth grade I discovered something I could do better than the other kids. One day, the teacher set up a bunch of chairs, and she had everyone run to the chairs and back while she timed us. I had the fastest time in the whole school!
True teachers use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own.