But was life merely meant for pleasure? Perhaps not. But it was meant for happiness or for the quest of happiness.
You are more likely to meet your enemies, if you have any, upon the road than off it. But then also you are more likely to meet friends there, too. You may seek your friends with success on the road. And if you wish counsel they are there to help you. “Life is like a road,” says a Kirghiz proverb. “If you go astray it is not your enemies who will show you the way, but your friends.”
Still, where the Kirghiz live, in Central Asia, there are few roads and you cannot go astray on them. The proverb must refer to mountain tracks. “Life is like a mountain track.” Yes, that is better. Let the mountain track be our first emblem of life.
For the Sokols and the Scouts, the roads shall mean much more, because their lives are auxiliary to military efficiency. They learn to be ready to resist an enemy of their homeland. A good scout becomes a good volunteer soldier, a good route marcher. But scout and sokol are transitional. The Scout movement is like a tug to take an ocean-going ship out of harbor. There comes a point when the ship can make its destiny under its own steam. The Scout and Guide movement helps boys and girls out of the rut of home and village, starts them moving, and once set going, many of them keep moving all their lives and never once stagnate. On the roads that lead out into the great world they march in their companies, with scoutmasters and commanders. Then the road is a glorious symbol of freedom and life.
The second emblem is the river, which, clear and innocent, finds the easiest and most charming way from birth to eternity. We were born on an invisible river which keeps gliding and singing and filling and flowing. We do not know where we go, but we know we are on the stream. We do not always perceive the movement, but we observe that the landscape has changed.
So when we look on a river we are affected by its hidden relationship to our own life. The river interprets our mood. The road suggests God as a taskmaster who would have us work; the river suggests Him as a poet who would have us live in poetry. The Creator must be a poet—not a General or a Judge or a Master Builder; there is so much of pure poetry in His creation. The river, like a child’s definition of a parable, is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.
When we look on a river with a poet’s eyes we see in it the reflection of an invisible river, the river of Time, the river of man’s life, the river of Eternity. “Man may come and man may go, but I go on for ever.”
There is a strange and wonderful vigilance about the river which rolls past us where we sleep in the grass, murmuring and calling the whole night long, something of the vigilance of the starry sky. You sleep, but an eternal sleepless sentry paces by all the while.
Then in the morning, when we bathe in the river, we are our own John the Baptists, out in the wilderness, baptizing ourselves with water, and saying: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Turn away from the road for Heaven is near by.” And we eat that wild honey of the wilderness, which the prophet ate when his baptizing was done.
When we wash in the stream we are washing ourselves with life. When we swim in the stream, especially against the stream, we are joying the heart of an unseen Mother who takes pride in us all, knowing that, although we must at last flow out with the stream, we can triumph over it for moments.