28.

   “Should I manage to live through it?”, I sputtered, collapsing back into the basket. I suddenly realized that for some strange reason even though a couple of huge monsters in a matter of a few minutes had done their best to snuff me out, it had never occurred to me that I had almost been killed.
   “You’re going to die someday anyway. We all are.”, reasoned Nanette as she hopped on to my chest. “The journey is the lesson, and we have no more control over it than you do.”
   “The sooner you make adversity a friend in life, the better.”, waxed Pat. He batted at the fish as they jumped in the air. “If not, someday you’ll find you will have little time left to make up for the time you have wasted.”
   “Do you know what makes us older, Oliver?”, asked Nanette. “When we stop being surprised and challenged at what life throws at us and get angry and scared instead. We go from ‘Now what am I going to do?’ to ‘What am I going to do now?’. We don’t really run out of options. We just stop looking for them.”
   Great. I almost get squashed like a bug then I’m told to get used to it and now I get a lecture. I dropped my arms over the sides of the basket and let my hands trail in the water as fish jumped around me. My head fell back and I looked up at the drifting clouds. I was irritated. I was spent. The wonder was on hold, the cynicism was back and the river was moving faster now as mountainous terrain replaced the serenity of the desert.