“I Don’t Think Even the River Knows Where It’s Going Until It Finds the Sea”

Last weekend, I was visiting an old friend in Montecito when she suggested we take a quick drive slightly off the familiar path to a bookstore in Summerland called Godmothers.

The store itself felt almost cinematic — quiet, warm, beautifully curated, filled with books stacked thoughtfully across long wooden tables and shelves. At one point, my eye caught a brightly illustrated children’s book resting near the center of one of the displays. It was colorful and whimsical, the kind of book that immediately pulls you in before you even realize why.

As I flipped through the pages, I came across a line that stopped me:

“I don’t think even the river knows where it’s going until it finds the sea.”

I have thought about that sentence almost every day since.

Because we live in a culture increasingly obsessed with certainty.

We are encouraged to have the five-year plan.

The roadmap.

The strategy.

The optimized timeline.

The clear answer.

And when life deviates from the original plan — when relationships end, careers shift, identities evolve, priorities change, or the path suddenly bends in an unexpected direction — many people immediately assume something has gone wrong.

Especially women in midlife.

There is often this quiet internal belief that by now, we should have fully figured ourselves out.

But rivers do not move in straight lines.

A river:

moves before certainty

adjusts to terrain

changes direction

encounters resistance

widens

narrows

slows

surges

is shaped by what it encounters

and eventually reaches something larger than itself.

Perhaps we are not so different.

Some of the most meaningful moments in our lives emerge not from rigidly staying the course, but from the unexpected detours along the way.

A career we never planned to pursue.

A city we never intended to live in.

A relationship that changed us.

An ending that redirected us.

A season that initially felt like failure, only to reveal itself later as transformation.

History is filled with explorers who set out toward one destination and accidentally discovered another world entirely. What appeared to be being “off course” became the very thing that expanded their understanding of what was possible.

And yet, many of us resist detours in our own lives as though changing direction is evidence of instability rather than growth.

But even neuroscience reminds us that adaptation is part of how we evolve.

Novelty, challenge, and new experiences help create new neural pathways — strengthening cognitive flexibility and expanding our capacity to navigate complexity over time. In many ways, our brains themselves were designed not for rigidity, but for growth through movement and experience.

Sometimes the path that stretches us is also the path that rewires us.

This does not mean every detour is easy.

Rivers encounter resistance too.

They collide with rocks.

They narrow into constricted spaces.

They overflow their banks.

They slow almost to stillness before gathering momentum again.

But they continue moving.

Not because they possess a perfect map — but because movement itself is part of the process of becoming.

I think many women quietly exhaust themselves trying to engineer certainty before allowing themselves to move forward.

Waiting until they know exactly who they are.

Exactly what comes next.

Exactly how the story ends.

But perhaps clarity is not something that always arrives before movement.

Perhaps some clarity only arrives because of it.

Perhaps the point is not to force every season of life into a perfectly engineered plan.

Perhaps the point is to remain open enough to let life shape us a little along the way.

To trust that not every bend in the river is a mistake.

That some detours teach us more than staying the course ever could.

And that even the river — with all its meandering, resistance, widening, narrowing, and redirection — eventually finds its way to the sea.