Sitting in my car by the lake the other day, I watched the fallen leaves dance by in gusts of wind across a sandy beach. The cold air rippled the surface of the water into shades of black and gray.

Like the water in the lake, all life is movement. The water moves at the whim of the wind and we are carried to wherever our life circumstances dictate we should go.

Three-time Olympic gold medalist in bicycling Kristin Armstrong knows something about movement, but she talks about the need to stop the merry-go-round of motion.

“When everything is moving and shifting, the only way to counteract chaos is stillness. When things feel extraordinary, strive for ordinary. When the surface is wavy, dive deeper for quieter waters.”

When the lake’s surface is still, the water is transparent. You look in and you see your face mirrored with a backdrop of clouds in a perfect blue sky.

During these times of no movement, I’m not “there.” Actually, I’m not anywhere. I feel weightless, and mindless with a welcomed absence of all thought.

The lake surface glass, in all seasons, is special. Even in the dead of winter, a blissful peace prevails from the silence. Time stops when stillness pervades. There is no yesterday, no tomorrow, just now that holds me steady in place.

Indra Devi, who introduced yoga to America, said, “Like water, which can clearly mirror the sky and the trees only so long as its surface is undisturbed, the mind can only reflect the true image of the Self when it is tranquil and wholly relaxed.”

There is a certain fear that arises when the lake offers us an invitation to explore the “Self” because we might not want to know the answer to the question, “Who am I?”

We don’t make self-searching a priority. We often let others tell us who we are or try to become who they want us to be.

But the water in the lake asks us to dive onto the depth of the soul to truly know the Self, and surprisingly we might discover we’re not who everyone thinks we are.

The community knows a man to be cranky and quick-tempered, but if you walk into his house you see his beautiful watercolor paintings of the songbirds that visit his backyard feeder.

A teenager who is often truant from school sits at home and builds wooden miniature amusement parks complete with a carousel and a roller coaster. A former all-state football player writes poetry that he marries to his original music he plays with his guitar. A woman who never leaves her desk at work and avoids the gossip at the lunch table holds therapy sessions in her home for battered wives.

The lake’s water doesn’t care about reputation. It holds no ego and has no interest in what we think of it. If we allow ourselves to absorb its power, we can find our truth in the same way.

Author Herman Hesse wrote, “They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.”

At daybreak last summer while I cast a fishing line into the lake through the mist of the awakening morning, I saw a young woman sitting on a dock nearby, She was perfectly still in the misty dawn. She sat there for quite some time. Her eyes were fixed upon the lake and I wondered what she was feeling through what appeared to be a transcendental experience with the water before her.

The sun blinked over the trees, and as is if cued by nature’s maestro, a light breeze began to move the water in gentle waves.

The young woman moved too, and I thought that something had stirred inside her. I turned my attention to my fishing line, and when I looked again she was gone.

We find different ways to commune with the water. People ask me how I can fish in the lake for hours and not get a single bite and still find the experience so rewarding. I reply by saying that’s why we call it fishing, not catching, but the primary reason I fish is to be at the water, to be still, and to reflect.

While looking out on Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “As the sun went down, I saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. The falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and I was soothed with an infinite stillness. I got the world, as it were, by the nape of the neck, and held it under in the tide of its own events, till it was drowned. …”

We can let the waves of the water wash away our worries of the world.

Then we feel a healing and find our peace.

Rich Strack can be reached at katehep11@gmail.com.