Most of us, when we encounter a bridge, travel over it without much consideration. However, when I was in Istanbul taking a boat ride along the Bosporus, I traveled underneath two magnificent, gigantic bridges, The Bosphorus Bridge and the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, and this journey underneath did cause me to pause for a moment.
When gazing up at the two bridges, I realized it had been close to 20 years since I had traveled under a bridge. It was in Amsterdam, back in the previous millennium, seemingly several lifetimes ago. Going under bridges in the Dutch city of canals, was quite a different experience than on the Bosphorus. The bridges in Amsterdam are very low and the boats aren't really as tall as the average person. We were riding on one of these long and not-at-all-tall canal boats and I can remember the captain warning us to lower our heads so that we wouldn't bash them against the bottom of a particularly low bridge. I felt as though when crossing under the bridges of Amsterdam it was almost like we were dancing the Limbo, each bridge representing one more bar we had to struggle our way under.
On the Bosphorus though, the two bridges we traveled under seemed bigger than all the hundreds of bridges in Amsterdam combined. When you drive over a bridge, even one as long as the Bosphorus bridges, you can still see the end point where you will arrive back on land. But when you travel under one of these mammoth structures, they seem to extend almost into infinity, the end point indiscernible.
The expression "it's water under the bridge" is a piece of advice we give someone to tell them to stop dwelling on a particular event in the past, because that event is gone the instant after it takes place, departing much like water that flows toward the sea. The perspective I had from underneath the bridges of the Bosphorus caused me to re-think the metaphor and turn it upside down to, "it's a bridge over water." Perhaps it's the piece of advice I can give when I need to tell myself to stop dwelling on a particular event in the future, because that event will be arrived at (or not) regardless of one's worry, much like a bridge eventually reaches land, even though the end point might be, in that moment, indiscernible.
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| View of the Bosphorus Bridge, looking toward Asia |
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| The perspective from underneath the Bosphorus bridge |
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| The perspective from underneath the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, looking toward Europe. |
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| A more-traditional view of the Bosphorus Bridge |
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