Saturday, September 06, 2008 A drop of water By Ober Khok
A GOBLET of cold water or a tall glass of water mixed with a few drops of lemon juice perfectly seal even a humble meal.
A refreshing dip in the pool or an invigorating swim in the sea always reminds you of how important water is to life.
British writer, D. H. Lawrence said it succinctly: “Water is H2O: hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water and nobody knows what that is.”
What man does know is that water is life itself.
The importance of a nutrient can be judged by how long we can do without it. It can take weeks for a man to die from lack of food, but without water, a man can perish in eight to 10 days.
It is amazing how water maintains the balance in our body, how it can provide pillow effect for our joints. Although water has no calorie, and thus, is not a source of energy, we depend upon it to process our food and to remove digestive waste.
There’s the joke about thinking twice before drinking a drop of water drawn from a suspicious source — open well, mountain spring, flowing river — because you don’t know what invisible organisms thrive within.
To a thirsty man, this issue is of no consequence. What matters is the urgency to rehydrate the parched tongue.
Rescued men from shipwreck testify that they drunk seawater to quench their agony, not minding that saltwater will compound their body’s hunger for water.
The value of clean, potable water is emphasized each time we hear news about diarrhea outbreaks caused by unclean or contaminated sources.
However, it is a commodity that we waste when washing dishes, when doing the laundry, when watering the plants.
We draw from the earth’s reservoir like there’s no tomorrow. We rationalize that anyway, the sky will always provide us with those precious drops of water.
American writer John Updike once said “rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain there would be no life.”
What we can do to repay this grace is to drink each drop of water with more reverence and care. Water has power to make or break us.
A Japanese proverb put it well in subtle warning: Falling drops pierce the stone.
