‘No one enters the same river twice.’
—Heraclitus
There is a certain kind of line, I think, that we cross, when we realise this.
A subtle, unmeasurable change that occurs—like looking at the same picture but with a different perspective.
It’s like when you’ve been standing in the sunlight too long and you just now register, with a start, that the sun is different now, and so is the world.
And then you go home, because there’s no going back to that first, fragile moment.
I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of remaining suspended in time. I’ve always been repulsed with the idea of growing up. It is this fascination with forever, and this horror of change, which is why we end up taking about an old, mostly cryptic philosopher who believed that ‘the only constant in the world is change’.
This is part of a blog post about changing the world. The idea of changing the world, I think, itself finds its roots mostly in history and how the world has changed since then. And then we look at the future, the ultimate, impending, dooming future and we’re stuck by the wonder of how it will change in the decades to come.
If the idea of changing the world maybe interests you too, and pulls you in magnetically, maybe you should listen to it. Who knows, maybe you’re supposed to change the world, after all.
For now, however, let’s talk about growing up.
Heraclitus was a 6th century Greek philosopher who was famous for his sarcasm, his rude manners and his Theory of Flux.
Seriously, he was known as the ‘obscure’ and the ‘dark one’ because of deliberately making his writings difficult to understand, apparently in order to spite the common public.
But his theory of flux, above all, is what made me study about him more than the syllabus demanded.
The Theory of Flux
According to his theory, ‘Everything is in constant flux’.
Flux means a continuous movement. Heraclitus says that all things pass and nothing stays and in doing so, he compares all existing things to the flow of a river. It’s everflowing. And so are we.
It looks as if the water that flows in the river is the same—it was there a moment ago and it is there now. But only the appearance of the water is what doesn’t change, the water you saw and dipped your hand in a moment ago is long gone.
The water you touch now is different.
This is the meaning of the statement ‘It is not possible to enter the same river twice’ for the river has changed and so have you. You cannot experience the same moment twice, in simpler words.
Everything is momentary. Everything changes. A depressing thought, sometimes.
It’s because this is a depressing thought that there is such obsession with the idea of people trying to go back in time—trying to go back to that one memory. Nostalgia is the strongest of all emotions, for it is born of love and grief both.
We’re always searching for that one moment, and one more, and one more. And we’re always trying to recreate these moments. And all through this, we don’t even know if that moment even exists as we remember, if memory has not muddled—has not beautified it. And yet, we still wish for every such moment to last. No moment ever lasts. Change is certain and we know it. But we don’t accept it.
Acceptance Is The Key
Now, usually, I’m no great fan of accepting—it seems a lot like compliance and gives you an overall feeling of undue obedience. But acceptance in this case actually works in our favour. I’ve realised that the more we accept this fate of ours—the fate of growing up and growing old—the more we realise that it is not such a terrible fate after all. If nothing ever remains the same, then we’ve got to learn to love it that way. If the water you saw a moment ago is not the same as the water you see now, that doesn’t mean that it will somehow taste bad.
Whenever I think of acceptance, the first thing that comes to my mind is this line written by Shakespeare I read years ago. I memorised it then, knowing that I’ll need it all my life.
‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’
—Sonnet 116
It means that when you love something or someone, you don’t stop loving them just because the object of your love has changed. Your love doesn’t change with the change in time. And once you start loving this life, this world, yourself, you are no longer scared by the prospect of change. Because you know that the things might change, and will change, and you yourself are bound to alter, but that this change will never be strong enough to change your love. Just because life was different, maybe even better last year, last month, even yesterday, does not mean that it can’t be just as good in the future.
And as you grow older, you even look forward to the change. It might sound very far fetched, but actually it isn’t. It’s like when you accept growth, you become a child again. You want to test things out, learn new things, see new things. Just like you were in childhood, you are finally curious again.
Flowing Down With The River
When we’re children, we’re always moving, always going beyond where we’re told to go, always crossing the line. It’s because we are curious little things who have their whole life before them, and god, we want to live it. We want to squeeze every drop, every second out of the time we’re given.
Then, eventually, as we grow older, we miss that time. But actually, we’re not missing that time. We’re missing the attitude we had at that time. We’re missing the carefree minds and restless souls and the energy that never went away until bedtime—sometimes not even then.
We’re missing the time when we thought that ‘we have all the time’.
And it is only when we learn to accept this growth that this curiosity comes back. We start to look forward to the future. We begin seeing life as a plant, and we want to see how those leaves grow out. We want to watch what colour the flowers will be. We look at the river of change that Heraclitus is obsessed with and we flow down with it. We go with the flow.
The river of life is flowing downwards, always away from its source, and sometimes we’re really scared to let it carry us down with it. At first, we don’t want to let go of the mountaintop and hate the way the river is flowing. We hate the passage of time. But as we grow, as we learn to trust the flow, we become curious to see where this river will lead us. What next sight will it make us see. We want to know the destination. And as we flow down, as we look forward to this destination, we start enjoying the journey.
