Ride the current from within if you want to make it all the way to the sea.

From Alfred’s journal

The creek came up brown and fast after Tuesday's rain, and I spent most of the afternoon on a low willow watching things go down it. A branch as thick as my leg kept catching, swinging broadside, hanging on a rock, tearing loose again. A maple leaf behind it went past all of that without touching anything, because it had given up on having a shape of its own. For years I thought the leaf was the lazy one. Ride the current from within if you want to make it all the way to the sea; I wrote that down and then sat there wondering whether the leaf gets any say in where it lands, or whether I only admire it because it is small enough to be carried. Switch came down the bank to ask what I was staring at and I did not have a short answer.