Down By The River

Down By The River

John Paul Derryberry

One of the funniest lines uttered on Saturday Night Live is when Matt Foley, the motivational speaker played by Chris Farley, utters to some wayward kids, "I live in a van down by the river". It's absolute comedy gold as Farley is so committed to the bit that every other actor cannot control themselves and breaks character often. I often think of this bit on the yearly trip to Eldora, Iowa, to camp along the Iowa River with my friends. I'm a storyteller/speaker, and while I do not live in the van down by the river, I travel to a couple different ones yearly. The yearly trek is made for connection, clarity, and a reminder of why I care so damn much about improving other people's lives. 

Life gets hectic and busy, and often making sense of why we do what we do is pushed far down the to-do list. For many of us, that thought drives a lot of fear. What if the answer is: I do what I do for a lot of the wrong reasons. Or, worse yet: what if I do what I do and I have no clue what the reasons are. Am I wasting the one life I've got through actions I have taken? What a fool I must be if that's the reveal from the meditative session. There is fear, anxiety, and doubt that overcomes us when we feel lost on roads we thought we knew. So we ignore situations that would put us in a contemplative mood through numerous and various methods of ignorance. 

My fear of those revelations drove and still drives my mental health. I have learned through the years for the sake of my sanity, I cannot avoid those meditative sessions. My personality can too quickly land in a horrible state of arrogance if I'm not rooted in a constant grounding of examining how I treat people and how I interact with those who have less than me and those that have more than me. I must discuss how I treat people because I sometimes slip and fail to do it the best. As I grow, evolve, and interact with others, I get better at not slipping. 

So, the question on your mind probably is, why does this annual trek gauge the barometer of my integrity? Because the folks who attend have known me at my worst. When only a slimmer of the good stuff leaked out, the more arrogant version of me drove the personality most of the time. They latched onto the good stuff and helped me feel safe enough over the years to engage in a process to allow the better parts of me to grow and the poor parts to shrink. It opened avenues for me to be brave enough to do the thing most of us fear, challenge my own thinking about who I am and who I want to be. 

In the skit, it was horrible to end up by the river. Yet in my experience, that experience and the conversations about who we are, what we are trying to accomplish, and how we achieve it, have changed my life. Twenty years later, it spawned the notion that my job isn't to tell people how to live but to show them that so many of us think through the same life situations and feel the same emotions with the most minor deviations from one another. Compassion for others and ourselves is the key to unlocking the best versions of ourselves, our families, friends, and communities. Twenty years in, I'm more confident than ever in this yearly trek; we find our best selves in places off the beaten path; mine just happens to be down by the river.