Change is Constant

“You cannot step twice into the same river.”

Heraclitus

        What the Greek philosopher Heraclitus implied with this epigram of a river of flux, is that the river you stepped into can impossibly be the same one you will again step into a fraction of a second later.  Just as the river is continuously changing, so everything in life is changing as well. As the river is, so are we, we change continuously.

Heraclitus was of the opinion that change alone is unchanging. What we are, never changes, but who we are, never stops changing. In essence then, at every moment of one’s existence we are either growing into more or retreating into less, that is, we are living a bit more on the one hand, and we are dying a bit more on the other hand.

We therefore not only live in a world of flux, but we are actually flux. The question we should now ask ourselves is: How should we react to such an inevitable chance? I know that there are many who will kick against such change. I think that we should take to heart the words of Jimmy Carter when he said that we ought to accept and adapt to external change, but that we should still hold on to those principles which we find to be of an unchanging nature. Your life may seem as constant as the river, but you are continuously changing, so please make an effort to always change for the better, because at the end of the day, the only constant in life is change.

It may not sound too nice,

When I say you cannot step into the same river twice.
Change is inevitable,

so embrace change, if you will.