theUncommon

“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”

- Heraclitus

But what if you could?

The river flows on, the bed churned by the implacable force of a thousand miles, a thousand years. The trees of your youth have grown beyond the shapes they held in your mind, the river banks have widened and fallen and regrown countless times in your absence. The river has flown on with wings of foam, taking your childhood visits with it. But the eddies and whirlpools are jealous things, they can keep the detritus of the river within for more time than the rushing water should allow.

A twig, a leaf, a memory, a moment. A time of joy and innocence and adventure caught, ever swirling, in an impossibly perfect loop. The tail end flapping loose like a projector once the film is spent, waiting for an intervention to release the myriad worlds contained within.

You breathe the heady scents of your childhood, and you step. The same foot, the same river, the same life just further down the stream. A moment of memory caught in the eddies of life, a moment lived and relived.

The chill of the water sparks the neurons that send the message that finds, with a rush, the memory of this place and you step into the river of your childhood. The dappled light pushing through the trees is the light of a better time. A laugh, a scream, a splash, a chase. The faces of friends long gone, lost to you in a way more fundamental than any death, lost to growth and time and a world made complex by perspective.

You draw out your foot, and hear the rushing of traffic. The reverie is gone, the eddie is broken, the loop is closed. The moment drifts on down the stream to reach the ocean of experience and become lost in it’s currents. A moment gained and a moment lost.

You could not step twice into the same river; for you are ever flowing on to other waters.