My little dog, Dear Abby, likes to walk on a trail along a creek through the woods. Passing through the dappled light that works its way through the oaks and bay trees, the mind clears, the body settles, and we find a refuge, an island between minutes ago and minutes to come, the water right there, flowing. Dear Abby, just a swirl in the water of time, flows next to me. And you, too, the swirling vortex of you, stirring everything and everyone in your path. The water dances over rocks and around roots, calm where it’s deep and frenetic in the shallow rapids, but always moving forward.

We can look back and remember how it felt to flow and how it felt to fall. It’s hard to forget the falls. We can strive and struggle and yearn, but we can’t row upstream, not in this river. Sometimes we don’t even notice the flow of time, the canvas where we paint our lives, we’re too busy and it’s too close. It’s in the rapids of change when we most appreciate the pools of contentment.

What is eternal? And what floats away? What is conditional and what is unconditional and what’s the difference? Conditional means dependent on actions, the tiny few that we control and the vast extent of all else; conditional means fleeting and transient, the water, not the river. Unconditional means unchanging, permanent, independent of my actions or yours, unaffected by action or will.

I have friends who say that it all happens for a reason. Is the reason conditional? Do Destiny and Fate laugh?

My little dog guides me along the trail and we emerge into sunlight. The creek picks up speed here and sings the gentle song of flowing water. A song that means health and hope and brings peace to the hearts of all creatures under this particular sun. Life came to this place on conditions: a rocky planet with air and water in just the right combination, set just the right distance from just the right star.

If life is conditional, nothing that comes with life can be unconditional.

Unconditional means more than that something can survive any cause or effect — be it the course the creek takes or that the sun will rise and set or ethereal things like trust and joy — it means more than that something will outlast the interactions of mother earth and father sea, and the water that flows over one to fill the other. From the scale of the universe to the glue that holds quarks together to make protons and neutrons and everything else — it all changes. Nothing is immune to the flow of the river. Snow melts, rains come, and the river carries it all away. The river even erodes rocks into sand.

Dear Abby looks up at me, her foxy ears perked, questioning. She wags her plume of a tail, puts her nose to the trail and tugs her leash, content again, satisfied that I can solve it (she thinks quite highly of me, that little dog).

The only things that can’t be taken away are what has already happened, and our ultimate destination. And maybe taxes.

She tugs me around a curve and into the cool darkness of a massive oak that has stood here sipping this creek for centuries. We step onto a field bathing in gusts of wind that blow waves through the grass, weaving greens, yellows, and flaxen gold into the color of life.

A brook joins the creek and makes it wider and wilder. The little dog pulls me into the future, to the mouth of a ravine where the creek finds a river. The sun burns the back of my neck, and the wind pulls the moisture from my face. I concentrate on breathing — that first trick in the meditation handbook — Dear Abby’s nose reaches up and grabs whatever she can. Inhale and fill yourself, exhale and let it all go, and again. Accept what attaches you to your fleeting life so that you can let go of it. I know this river, I know where it goes, how it ends.

Surely there must be something that’s unconditional.

Love?

The currents flow in too many directions. Eric Kandel, the humble Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist, said that love is the combination of joy and trust, but trust means nothing without diving into the rapids and risking it all.

The trail takes us down to where the river carves a valley, through the scattered, spicy shade of bay laurel trees, their bark graced with soft moss. The water flows in one direction with inexorable purpose, dark in the depths, and then it hits the rocks, splashes into the air and grabs tendrils of sunlight that it scatters into dozens of tiny rainbows. Love leaves a wake of comfort through the depth of experience, even more so when it survives the rapids of change.

How many times has the course of your life hinged on the smallest grain of sand, the softest ripple in the river? The direction you turn in a grocery store, the chair you chose that day in the library, the book that altered your course, all the tiny and huge pieces, the sand and rocks, the turbulence and calm that grew you into who you are.

So many tiny causes, so many huge conditions — is the reason so simple?

Is the river unconditional? Not the route it takes, any rock can alter that — in a drought, a pebble can change its course — but not its destiny. Every river knows its destiny, and every river flows for the same reason.

Dear Abby pulls me to the river’s bank, to a patch of gravel with a gentle slope where she can drink.

What came before is unconditional: your experiences, the ripples you left behind, the vortex of emotion that creates you, and the vortices of others that stir you, even tiny Dear Abby stirs me.

Everything that happens, happens so that the river can make it to the sea.