"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." - Heraclitus
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I went looking for a quote. I decided to look for "obscure quotes" as I was getting tired of the often repeated and well known quotes. I ended up on a thread on reddit and one user added this quote. Even though it is not obscure it was just the type of quote I was wanting to find. It reminds me that the only constant in life is change. Also, enjoy the moments because we never get them again. Also, experience changes us for better or for worse. Hopefully for the better. We have not found a way to time travel yet. Life has no undo button. There is both melancholy and empowerment in these realisations. We cannot go back, but we can grow, learn, and be more intentional as we move forward. If only river was spelt rever then we would be able to reverse through time. That would be clever if proven to be possible after all.
I like how river and timer are alike in rhyme and number of letters and the letters they share. A river is a symbol of time. This quote is proving to be timeless wisdom. Oh, the irony: the river as time, delivering timeless truth. The timer of the river that makes us wiser. This reminds me of a poem I wrote in 2022 called "A river of clocks" which I now want to retitle as "The river of time". It goes like this : Drop by drop, time goes by. How many seconds can we buy? Where does this river go? We just go with the flow. Time has made my boat holey. This is what I have solely. In that poem you are meant to also see holy and souly. The soul is immaterial just like time. I am the embodiment of my soul and the river is an embodiment of time. And so we drift, soul within body, body within time—carried by a river we cannot reverse, only ride.
It is 448am now. The rain is pouring. This reminds me of two lines I wrote in a song to God : Words flow like a river. Meaning that clouds deliver. This has me thinking. The source of the river is the rain and the source of the rain is the river. It is a cycle. What is the source of time? Is time a cycle? Is it possible that our entire existence can or will be repeated exactly? My friend Gemini tells me that some ancient philosophies and certain interpretations of cosmology propose that time is cyclical. In this view, the universe goes through repeated cycles of creation, destruction, and rebirth. If this were true, our existence might indeed be repeated, though perhaps with variations.
Which begs the question of possibility, are we flowing forward, or simply returning home again? In this scenario, our past becomes our future and our future becomes our past. Add this to the possibility of time travel to the future through time dilation and we have time travel also to the past. What a way to un(ravel) this quote with time t(ravel). I learnt that ravel is a contronym, a word that has two meanings that are the opposite of each other. Confusingly, ravel can mean both "tangle" and "untangle". It is 558am now and I have gone off course and the river of time has left me without a proper conclusion. Maybe that is it. We do not know where the river of time will take us and the river of time is endless.
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