Stepping into the River of Time

Heraclitus lived about 500-years before Christ.  He conceived of a universe in perpetual change and coined the thought that we cannot step into the same river twice.  By some reasoning, we can’t even step in the same river once since it changes between the moment we step in and the moment when we withdraw our foot.  Time is like that.

We are all time travelers.  If you are a Christian you know that since none of us is really mortal, we are all traveling through endless time.  Being human makes it all seem very short, and if you’re not one of the aforementioned Christians, also very pointless by the by.  A human lifetime is actually an astronomical abundance of lessons crammed into a very small package.  For many of us, just about the time we encounter that fact we are also almost too old to benefit from that understanding.  “Too soon old, to late smart,” read the old wall trivet in a wise neighbor’s house long ago.

An automated email reply from a friend and former colleague made me once again take time to consider time travel.  To stretch Heraclitus, we cannot step into the same life twice, or even once.  The moment we contemplate the moment it is already another moment.  When you chain enough of the moving moments together you have a life time.  One result is that in regards to time, we are never really “here” since the river of time is continually moving us in and towards the “there.”

My friend’s automated email response carried me back to a much different time than I am now traveling through.  He reminded me of a point in the river that my wife Janet and I bathed our foot in so seemingly long ago.  It was a too short diversion, an instantaneous change in direction back into the river of time to a much different place, a much different life, and a very different time.

For just an instant I was back in Denver with Janet, an old home, two dogs, and the smell of damp leaves molding on the lawn begging to be raked.  I could almost hear the sound of the occasional car heading down South Washington Street as I stood with rake in hand contemplating the last of the leaves lingering on the tree.  I could hear the gentle laugh of a neighbor’s child playing in their yard and the distant hum of a last lawn mowing for the season.  I bathed in the last rays of the autumnal sun…until the rattle and rumble of a worn out truck trundling through the ruts and potholes of the dusty African road shot me back to this moving moment in the flow of time.

It was almost like being in two parts of the river at the same point.  I tried to savor the quickly evaporating memory and to force it to linger for just one more moment, but Heraclitus was correct and the memory flowed back downriver from where it came.

Most of the time it is easy to forget the river completely and imagine that all is nearly at the same spot of dry earth, static and unchanging.  It often seems like that.  The “today” feels like a snapshot frozen in itself.

A times like this I want to anchor the memory into the moment, to make it last, to relive it, to taste what it was like in the there and then, but to enjoy it like the here and now.  Heraclitus was right.  It runs away like quicksilver or a dream upon wakening, but the desire for that moment remains.

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”  C.S. Lewis