Every year, for a week or two, depending on the weather, we can be in awe of the amazingly beautiful cherry blossoms. I have never seen them in person but when I see pictures of them or see them on tv, they are beautiful.

Are they more beautiful because they come at the end of a long winter ? Are they more beautiful because they give us hope for a future of warm days and sunshine? Would they be as beautiful if they bloomed in July instead of late March?

And then, in the blink of an eye, they are gone and replaced by green.

And that my friends, got me thinking. About a lot of things really. How fleeting is life, relationships, our children growing up, etc etc.

But what it really got me thinking about is our society.

How we bounce from one thing to another without, at least to me, making much change. Someone or something happens and it’s all you hear about for a week or two and then someone or something else happens and the first thing is in the background or gone altogether but nothing ever changed from it. The issue is still there, we have moved on from it to something else.

And eventually, we come full circle and go through the same problems again, over and over.

And we have been doing it this way for decades and I don’t have the answers to fix it. I can only write about how I see it.

Then, as I’m thinking and looking at pictures, I noticed there in the background, meandering slowly through the picture, is the Potomac River.

But the river name doesn’t matter because all rivers are the same.

All rivers are created by smaller streams, creeks, etc flowing into them making one body of water that are no longer separated, but must work together to flow throughout its life.

And in any river you will have rocks and boulders and banks to navigate in and out and around and through.

But then the river comes back together as one.

Which is the point I’m getting to.

What if we always remembered that we, as a society, are the river. We come from different places, different walks of life, we have different beliefs and we talk differently, but we are all living here together and if we flowed together like the river does, then the beauty of the cherry blossoms would not be fleeting.

What if we remembered the hurt, remembered the pain, remembered the love and remembered the beauty of all of us and all of the world.

It’s easy to get used to seeing the beauty of a sunset until we wake up one day and realize we haven’t noticed it in months.

We have to be intentional.

Because when we can learn to live together as one, the beauty of life and how we should live it, the humanity that flows from the river that feeds the cherry blossoms will be as beautiful as cherry blossoms every day, all year round.

I see trees of green, and roses in bloom, And I think to myself, what a wonderful world we can have.