River.

In a life properly lived, you’re a river. You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it; you can’t figure out a banal game plan applicable to all situations; you just have to go with the “beingness” of life, as Rilke would have it. 

Jim Harrison, from Paris Review's "The Art of Fiction", No. 104; interviewed by Jim Fergus, Issue 107, Summer 1988