"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."

~ Heraclitus

November 3, 2002

Welcome to Wyndspirit Dreams! I fell in love with this quote the moment I read it. It is so true! Life is always changing and we are always changing and life is always changing us, and we are always changing our lives. Every experience changes us in some way, if only by adding to the sum total of who we are. And every change within us causes us to look at the world with different eyes. Cause and effect, action and reaction.

It’s a common thing for an adult to return to their childhood home and find it much smaller than they remembered. Every time I go home and stay in the tiny guestroom that used to be my bedroom, I am amazed that I practically lived in that room. All the good memories are still there, and I love it as much as I always have, but it just seems so…small. Sure, I knew how small it was when I lived there, but it didn’t matter, because I had never experienced anything bigger. In other ways as well, home has changed. Buildings are falling down and the trees in the shelterbelt out back are slowly dying. It seems strange to walk there and look up and see so much daylight between the trees. The house has been painted and a kitchen added on since I lived there. In some ways, it’s not at all like the home I grew up in. It’s not true that you can never go home again. You can go home again, but it’s not the same. Time marches inexorably on. I am not the same person who lived there, either. I no longer spend hours biking up and down the driveway—I drive down it in my car. I am not the sheltered girl with big dreams and few opportunities. I am a world-weary adult who’s done things that sheltered girl never even dreamed of doing.

Just as wear and tear and changes and improvements turn our surroundings into something different, every single thing that happens to us changes us as well. I’ve become more worldly, in the literal sense that my life experiences have broadened my horizons. Now, combine that with the fact that every other person in our world is also gaining life experiences and changing. Even the people we know are not the same people they were in the past. We don’t interact with them in the same way we used to. My single friends are no longer just daughters, sisters, or friends. Now they are also wives and mothers. My parents are now also grandparents. My nieces and nephews are no longer little children. They are becoming teenagers, racing toward becoming adults. And always the dynamics between us keep changing. Now I fuss over my parents as much as they fuss over me. I’ve had to accept that my friends’ priorities are now their families. Very soon I will be relating to my oldest nieces and nephew on an adult basis.

It’s scary, and yet it’s reassuring. Life flows with us, over us, and around us. We are part of it, but we aren’t the only part. We constantly change and evolve, as does our world. And it’s a good thing. God never intended for us to live in the past. We only have the present, and to live in the present, we have to keep up with the present as it flows into the future. No matter how hard we try to hold back in the river of time, we get swept along, just like everything and everybody around us. Rivers are constantly changing. And so are we. It’s called living.
 
 

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meadowlark@wyndspirit.com
Wyndspirit Dreams