Rivers

It is impossible to go back to the same old places. Places change. Transform. So do people. They change, transform, grow out of their old selves and populate newer and stranger inner dimensions which might not have been known even to themselves before. Everything flows. It’s normal to long for the lost places of a bygone time. It’s human to pine and crave sometimes, for a return to those dreamscapes of the past. Irrational, though it may seem at times.

You can go back to a house in the hope of rediscovering your home. But it’s foolish to hope to rediscover that very home where once stood a table laden with all your favourite books and your cat stretched wide on top of your open world history text book, pawing at your pencil, as you tried to make sense of the Cuban Missile crisis or the Code of Hammurabi. It’s foolish to hope to return to that very sunny evening on the beach when you had allowed the unruly waves to demolish that sand castle you had built for the sheer joy of building it.

Still the mind feels sane sometimes, hoping for permanence, in full knowledge of the inevitability of change.  Perhaps it’s the very same reason why on some days we hurriedly look at clocks wishing that time would slow down a bit for us to help finish reading that last page of the last chapter of the last book for that last exam of the year… or why sometimes we longingly look back at our childhood days of trials and errors, hopelessly yearning to bring each and every fond memory back to life.

The paradox of being surrounded by places and people you can never return to could be one of the most absurd experiences in life, in spite of the undeniable truth of its universality. This could be why memories become those last ounces of breath we hold back within ourselves to keep us from drowning completely into the strange inevitabilities of existence. 

Change spares none. Heraclitus said it best: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”