All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the place where the rivers flow, there they flow again. Ecclesiastes1:7 #mscedc

I like a sense of narrative arc, and I was looking for something to reflect back to, and build from, my first Lifestream post.

I went online, looking for something about rivers reaching the sea and, via National Geographic about the Colorado River, and via Youtube for a Led Zeppelin ‘Ten Years On’ performance at Knebworth 1979 (Google’s search suggestion, not mine), I settled on this verse from Ecclesiastes.

For the interested, the whole book of Ecclesiastes is here. [A translational note: ‘meaningless’ or – in some other English versions – ‘vanity’ might better be rendered ’empty vapour’, i.e. it’s probably not a pejorative term per se.] The writer is intensely interested in the whole of life, its opportunities and also its limits. What the writer of Ecclesiastes would make of digital cultures is a matter for conjecture, but I think he would have much to say about each of the blocks of this course.

Also, I think the writer of Ecclesiastes would have something to say about Lifestreaming generally. Looking at the lifestreamblog.com website, which the EDC handbook pointed us to, lifestreaming in that guise seems very retrospective – ordered towards preserving the past, even as a means of surviving death. I think the writer of Ecclesiastes would have some caustic words to offer about that, as a totality of life – also a need to press forwards, to look ahead. But I think he’d like this video, which I encountered via a lifestreamblog.com post:

Perhaps this was the hidden, secret weapon for an east Lifestream assignment, and I missed it….

If I could live the course again (and, as a learner, that’s an interesting prospect), I’d imagine some things the same, and some things differently due to travelling the same way (and a different way) again. The writer of Ecclesiastes would be a great person with whom to travel downstream for a season of life. This time now passing, I’m thankful to those on the class who have travelled along the river at the same time as me, and thankful to James and Jeremy for their input and steer. And now, further on, further up, over later seasons, further streams, to the not-full sea, as rivers flow again.

Just those 500 words of overall write-up to go…,

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