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This article is not going to be about the “water pollution” caused by the dying of fish. But let’s waste the first paragraph thinking about it though. Fish die. Of course they do. All living things die. Even fish. But most living things die on land. On land where they rot and decay, giving off an awful smell. Unless of course the said living things are humans who get burned or buried out of love, duty, responsibility or even pity, after they die. The rest just rot causing what is said to be pollution, of air and land. So when fish die, do they cause water pollution? This ‘pollution’ shouldn’t have any effect in big water resources but in small lakes and ponds with a large number of fish, can the death of many fish at a time result in the death of many more fish? This way fish kill fish just by dying. Hmm…

That aside, this article came to be when I answered to a friend that I “go with the flow”. To this, she retorted that only dead fish go with the flow. This made me think for a while and then resulted in this article.

Only dead fish go with the flow.

Simply put, fish go against the flow of water. Those who go with the flow of water are the ones that are dead. But human mind doesn’t think that simply. It has to find meaning in everything and anything. So dead fish going with the flow doesn’t simply mean that once the fish are dead, they move with the flow of water. No, they don’t.

It means that those who blindly follow the path taken by everyone else without their own aims, their own aspirations are “dead”. Dead not as in dead body, but dead as in not living as we are meant to be living. Lying to ourselves, not being true to who we are and what we think we are.

Being a dead fish is easy. The path is easy and the outcome is certain. Our lives will be easy. They will follow a fixed path and end up exactly like how the lives of all others before us had ended. Easy!

But not being a dead fish, in one word, it’s uneasy. For one, we do not even know if the path is stable. We do not know if the path doesn’t lead us to a dead end. Uneasy, Troubling, Agitating, Upsetting, Unsettling, Worrying, Disturbing, Dismaying!

Many other…no thousands of people before me have written about it. But the one that I remember is by Robert Frost.

“I took the one less travelled by,

And that made all the difference.”

And with these lines, I end my article.