I wonder that. Who will throw pebbles into the river so that they dance on the water? Will it be knowledge that persists or will it remain a mere virtual game?

Last week my father (grandfather) Terrícola and I went to the river: three generations of the same family. We were going to look for pebbles to do activities, but we ended up spending most of the afternoon on the shore, throwing rocks.

Grandpa is a real crack throwing them and making them bounce on the water. Get them to jump 10 and do it without making it seem difficult.

I have remembered that I had also gone to the river when I was little with my parents. My brothers and I were trying to throw stones to make them dance on the water. But surely we don’t practice as much as my father did when we were little, and we never managed to make our stones jump as much as his.

I know that the quantity is not the important thing and that it is not necessary to compare … But I have not been able to avoid thinking about how the jumps of the stones on the water diminish with each new generation .

We spend less and less hours in nature, in rivers and on their banks and all that knowledge is lost. When there were no televisions, no consoles, or mobile phones, I am convinced that spending hours nearby, playing with other children to throw stones, to achieve more jumps, to perfect the technique, to overcome oneself … it was a slow process that was giving its fruits.

And that slowness was part of learning .

You do not get much if you only practice one day, you have to go regularly, learn to find the best stones, flat, light, not too small or not too large, and then gain skill with your own hand, know the water, learn to touch it and make the stone fly over and brush the river at the same time, until it sinks and gets lost in it.

I am convinced that now many children before going to play in the river will look for a tutorial on the internet about throwing stones. Logical, who will transmit that knowledge? And it’s not just that fewer and fewer people know about it, but that we have less and less time, less time to spend hours simply throwing stones into the river, over and over again, until they tiptoe over its course.

But there is even worse … virtual games (like this one on the Wii) that try to make you believe that you can learn to throw stones into the river with them, turning a game that takes place in the middle of nature into an activity between 4 walls, in front of a television screen.

Hopefully we still have time to rescue these old games and knowledge , and not so much because of the specific knowledge that is lost, but because of what is behind it and that also disappears, which is the value of learning over low heat, the value of the game adapted to our natural environment and the transmission of intergenerational knowledge .

May the shock waves of the water never stop mesmerizing us every time we throw stones into the river, as if we were children and saw them for the first time