The Margin Note
I was standing by a river last week, watching the water rush past. My daughter threw a stick in, and we watched it disappear downstream, swallowed by the current.
“Is it the same river as yesterday?” she asked.
Good question.
Later that evening, I opened a book of Presocratic fragments and found Heraclitus staring back at me:
“You cannot step into the same river twice.”
Of course. The water is different. The riverbed shifts. Even I am different—cells replaced, thoughts changed, the person who stood here yesterday is not quite the person standing here now.
And yet.
We talk about “the river” as if it’s a stable thing. We say “I” as if there’s something permanent underneath all this flux. We plan for the future, remember the past, as if there’s continuity.
What happens when we take Heraclitus seriously? When we really accept that everything flows?
The Question
If everything is constantly changing—the world, our bodies, our minds—what remains stable enough to call real? And more urgently: how do we live in a world where nothing stays the same, including ourselves?
The Exploration
What Heraclitus Actually Said
Heraclitus didn’t write a systematic treatise. We have only fragments—about 130 of them—preserved in quotes from later philosophers. But the core insight is clear:
You cannot step into the same river twice, for other waters are continually flowing on.
Heraclitus, Fragment 12
But here’s what’s often missed: Heraclitus wasn’t a simple relativist. He didn’t think flux meant chaos. Instead, he argued that change itself follows patterns—what he called logos, a kind of rational structure underlying all transformation.
Listening not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one.
Heraclitus, Fragment 50
So: everything changes, but change itself has order. The river flows, but it remains a river. Fire burns, but it follows laws. You’re not the same person you were yesterday, but there’s continuity in the pattern.
This is subtle. This is profound. And this is much harder to live than to understand.
The Buddha’s Echo
Twenty-five hundred miles east and maybe a century later, the Buddha taught something remarkably similar:
The Buddha went further than Heraclitus in one crucial way: he analyzed the self as another flowing river. There’s no permanent “I” underneath experience—just a stream of sensations, thoughts, and consciousness mistaken for a solid thing.
This is both liberating and terrifying.
Liberating because: if there’s no fixed self, then who you were yesterday doesn’t define who you are today. You’re not trapped by your past. Change is always possible.
Terrifying because: if there’s no fixed self, then what am I? What persists? What’s the point of planning, growing, becoming?
The Stoic Response
The Stoics inherited Heraclitus’s ideas (they called him “the Weeping Philosopher” for his somber view of human folly). But they turned flux into practice.
Time is a river of passing events—a rushing torrent. As soon as something comes into sight, it is swept past and something else takes its place.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (p. Book 4.43)
For Marcus, the lesson is practical: since everything changes anyway, don’t cling. Don’t rage against impermanence. Accept the flow.
This is easier said than done. Marcus himself struggled with it—his Meditations are full of reminders to himself to let go, accept change, embrace mortality. He knew it intellectually. But living it? That’s the work.
What I’ve Observed: The Illusion of Permanence
Here’s what I notice in daily life: we act as if things are permanent, even when we know they’re not.
We treat relationships as stable, then are shocked when people change. Your friend from college isn’t quite the same person anymore. Your partner has different interests than five years ago. You’ve changed too. And yet we expect everyone to stay frozen in time.
We cling to identities—“I’m a writer,” “I’m an introvert,” “I’m not good at math”—as if these labels are facts rather than patterns that might shift. We mistake description for essence.
We resist change in our environments, getting upset when the neighborhood coffee shop closes or our favorite show ends. We want the world to hold still.
We even resist change in ourselves. We look at old photos and think, “I was so different then,” with a mix of nostalgia and embarrassment. But we don’t quite believe that the current version is just as temporary.
This isn’t wrong, exactly. Treating things as stable is useful. You need some continuity to function. You can’t renegotiate your sense of self every morning.
But the friction comes when we forget it’s a useful fiction. When we mistake the pattern for permanence.
The Modern Paradox: Accelerating Flux
Here’s something Heraclitus couldn’t have anticipated: what happens when the rate of change accelerates?
In his time, life changed slowly. Your occupation was likely your parents’ occupation. Your village looked roughly the same decade to decade. The flux was there, but the rhythm was human-scale.
Now? Technology changes every few years. Jobs are obsolete within a generation. Cities transform overnight. Information flows faster than we can process it.
We’re still wired for slow change, but we’re living in Heraclitean rapids.
This creates a unique kind of anxiety: not just “everything changes,” but “everything changes too fast.” We can’t keep up. We’re constantly adapting, never arriving.
Maybe this is why ancient wisdom about flux feels so urgent now. We need it more than ever.
The Return
Back to the river. My daughter and I standing there, watching the water.
She asks: “If it’s not the same river, why do we call it the same name?”
Smart kid.
Here’s what I think now: the name points to the pattern, not the water. The river is the shape of the flow, not the substance flowing. Same with people. Same with everything.
You’re not the atoms that make up your body—those change constantly. You’re the pattern those atoms temporarily form. You’re a process pretending to be a thing.
This doesn’t make you less real. Rivers are real. Music is real—and music is pure pattern, pure flux, notes that exist only in their passing.
Maybe Heraclitus’s insight isn’t that nothing is real. It’s that reality is verb, not noun.
The river flows. You become. The world transforms.
And the wisdom is learning to flow with it—not clinging to what was, not grasping at what might be, but being present to what’s changing right now.
Heraclitus wept, they say. But maybe he was also laughing. Because once you see it—really see that everything flows—there’s a kind of freedom in it.
You can’t hold on anyway. Might as well open your hands.
The Thread
Related Ideas:
- Process philosophy (Whitehead): reality as “occasions” rather than substances
- Stoic amor fati: loving your fate, including its impermanence
- Buddhist meditation on impermanence as path to non-attachment
- Bergson’s durée: time as lived change, not measurable instants
- Ship of Theseus paradox: what persists through change?
Further Reading:
- Heraclitus — Fragments (Charles Kahn translation is excellent)
- Marcus Aurelius — Meditations (Gregory Hays translation)
- The Buddha’s Teachings on Impermanence — various translations of relevant suttas
- Alan Watts — The Wisdom of Insecurity (modern take on flux and anxiety)
- Annie Dillard — Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (observing change in nature)
Questions to Contemplate:
- What are you clinging to that has already changed?
- If you’re a different person than you were ten years ago, who will you be in ten more?
- How would you live differently if you truly accepted that everything flows?
- Is there anything that doesn’t change? (Love? Consciousness? The laws of nature?)
- When have you felt most at peace with impermanence?
References:
- Kahn, Charles H. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Cambridge University Press, 1979.
- Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Translated by Gregory Hays. Modern Library, 2002.
- The Dhammapada. Translated by Eknath Easwaran. Nilgiri Press, 2007.
- Kirk, G.S., J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The Presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge University Press, 1983.
- Watts, Alan. The Wisdom of Insecurity. Vintage, 2011.