Twenty-five: Change

Long before I sat wonderstruck beside my first river Heraclitus' had developed his philosophy of  vicissitude.  He said (and I paraphrase as no doubt Aristotle did before me), everything is moving, flowing and altering. It's impossible to step in the same river twice.  Why?  Because the same river doesn't exist.  In fact same doesn't exist.  But the mind thinks it does.  With its tidy system of labels, mind develops cognitive constructs with which to interpret the ever changing expanse of life and make sense of the ever changing now.  Unfortunately we forget this is going on and mistake our ideas about something or someone for truth.  But we can't meet the same person or moment twice any more than we can splash in the same river a second time.  Nope.  And when we relinquish our imagined control and allow life to simply be as it is, we free ourselves from the convincing grip of imagined consistency and the world offers itself for unmasking.  Wonder returns.  And each moment is discovered to be precisely the one we were made for.