I have always been a believer in building bridges. In all of our life friendships and relationships, fostered at home, in career & through love, we are required to build bridges to sustain true connection. Building bridges requires time and effort but once they are built, they ensure strong, stable, more honest & beautiful connections, fortified with real communication and deep comprehension.
Often our pride builds walls or dams between the other, dividing even what unites us; while our humility has the power to build bridges, connecting us even through our diversity & difference.
Building a bridge can be the reframing that allows us to honour the past, while still being in the present & moving forward towards the future. In this way, all of our experiences and evolutions, form the strong infrastructure to engineer the weathering of all of life's ebb & flow as we cross the rivers of our life's journeys.
Often the bridge - with time, effort, self-work and persistence in solidarity - will also manage to tame the wild uncontrollable currents of life circumstances that continuously threaten to upend us and threaten our relationships. To this end, I am reminded of the famous Pont St Benezet Bridge over the Rhone River in Provence, France where I visited in the icy winter of February 2018 on the banks of the Medieval City of Avignon. The Rhone River is the fastest and most powerful river in France - 812 km long. It often experiences challenging changes in water levels and volume, yet it has been used since before the Middle Ages as a major means of travel. The Pont St Benezet Bridge, constructed over the Rhone, collapsed many times over the years due to the force of the Rhone flooding but was continuously reconstructed to tame the river. It still stands today, bridging the test of time and the force of the Rhone River - a bridge that with the tweaks of modern civil engineering has learned to tame the powerful and uncontrollable river currents.
Finally, in order to prevent bridge collapse, to maintain & sustain strong infrastructure, the trade over the bridge must continue to be mutual love, respect, tolerance, open minds and open hearts. And just like all bridges require periodic engineering checks for sustainability - quality assurance and quality control - we too must check in regularly to test our bridge strength and its capacity to continue to hold who we are crossing with, where we are crossing to, and what we are choosing to pass across it.
LivwRiv is here to inspire the tools for building sustainable bridges together that will endure the test of time for crossing over all of the Rivers of Life. Let's lovingly, bravely, and joyously build bridges together for indeed "the whole entire world is a very narrow bridge and the main thing is to have no fear at all." (Rabbi Nachman of Breslov)
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