THE SAME RIVER TWICE
EPISODE 029: THE SAME RIVER TWICE
Everything changes, including we ourselves. Failure to recognize this essential impermanence, even to celebrate it, is a missed opportunity to live life as it is, not as we wish it could be, and to cope with change and uncertainty creatively rather than fearfully. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Nothing in British Columbia on Canada’s shaggy west coast heralds the coming of spring so unmistakeably as the pink blossoms erupting from the cherry and pear trees, which they’re doing right now, or they were when I wrote this. One minute it’s winter here and the days are short, dark and wet, then suddenly, winter just gives up, and surrenders to spring which for her part arrives in a flamboyant explosion of pink and white. The blossoms don’t stay long, they’re here and gone within 2 weeks of blooming, but in those two weeks they are astonishingly beautiful. Here and then so quickly gone, the cherry blossoms have long been a symbol in Japan of a concept called mono no aware, valued not because they have special significance despite their very brief appearance but for their transience, their exceptionally beautiful impermanence.
Mono no aware as best as I can understand it is an empathy toward the impermanence of things, and a gentle acceptance and sadness at their temporary-ness, and it fascinates me that in the West we seem to have no such equivalent, there is no western tradition of recognizing impermanence, much less celebrating it. It’s not that we don’t acknowledge that things change, in the west, but we seem to react by trying to mitigate and control that change, living in a constant state of denial about it, seeing it as the enemy, and doing what we can to eliminate it. It makes sense then that we, too, have no similar tradition to wabi sabi, the Japanese honouring of decay and imperfection and the natural flow of things.
If you’re wondering what this has to do with everyday creativity, let’s talk about it.
I’m David duChemin, and this is Episode 029 of A Beautiful Anarchy, The Same River Twice.
Music/intro
Twenty five hundred years ago in Ephesus in what is now modern-day Turkey, there was a Greek philosopher named Hercalitus, and it is from him, so many years ago, that we get the notion that you can never step into the same river twice. Not only because the water that swirls and eddies around your ankles the first time you wade in that river will be different water the second time around, the first water now being long down-river, and heading to the sea, but because you too are a different person. Heraclitus, without the modern understanding that most of the cells in our body are replaced roughly every seven to ten years, understood that everything changes, that we and all life are in flux and that the nature of life is change.
Heraclitus is not the only one to observe the impermanence of all things. This fundamental belief shows up in Buddhist thought, as well as Hinduism. And most religions and philosophies have made attempts to define what is eternal or infinite, if anything, and what is not. The latter category is almost always more crowded than the former. But this is not a lesson on the problem of change, it’s probably more like a meditation on what we’re going to do about it and what the impermanent nature of things means for our creative lives.
If we accept that everything always changes, and that we daily wade into new waters as new people, that life isn’t as much a matter of being who we are than it is about becoming who we are, then I think we open ourselves to the idea that creativity itself and all our creative efforts are a tool for exploring and coping with that change. If we step barefoot into that river always acknowledging that these are dark waters into which we’ve never stepped, then I suspect we do so more awake, more perceptive, and probably more alive, not to mention less neurotic, and anxious.
If everything is always changing then we will find ourselves less presumptuous about what we think we know, less entitled, and less willing to assume that the people in our lives are the same people they used to be. We’ll be more open to new needs and desires, both ours and theirs. The assumption, for example, that the person you married 20 years ago still wants the same things, or should, is no less harmful than being blind to your own changes. In other words, however long you remain married, no one stays married to the same person. Recognizing that could keep your relationship moving forward.
In other areas of our lives, the assumption that what worked 20 years ago will work now–or should–is one of the reasons people experience the so-called mid-life crisis. We fit ourselves into molds, patterns and structures at 20 years old that no longer fit the contours of our souls 30 years on. It is not only our waistlines that have changed but the shape of our whole being, and the choices we made, the compromises and blind decisions that we squeezed ourselves into when we were practically still kids, may no longer fit. The unhappiest ones are those that don’t accept the change and find a graceful way to navigate it, clinging instead to what was and who we thought we would always be, blind to the impermanence of everything, including who are.
This is one reason so many artists experience creative frustration with the creative process. When we find ways of being and working, when we solve a creative problem and figure out what works for us, and we camp out there once and for all, we repeat ourselves and do work that has no appearance of risk, which is easier, but unsatisfying. And when faced with inevitable changes we forget that the river is flowing around us, is already a different river rushing past a changing person, we panic and try to claw our way back to what once worked for us.
This idea of the Heraclitean river of constant change has made that change easier for me, and allowed me to stand in the constant flow of life without my brain exploding and my soul hurting from the kind of bruises we get from trying to hold that change back and stop it all from moving forward, trying to keep everything the same. I’m trying to find a way to make clear why this perspective, well, it changes everything.
As a photographer one of the more lucid examples lies in the relationship between my craft and my vision. I suspect it’s the same for any artist in any craft. My vision for what I’m trying to do or say with my photographs is always outpacing my craft or the ability to do and say those things with my available tools and skill. It does this because I am not the artist I was a year ago, and the things I am trying to do or say with my art, they’ve changed with me because they are me. And as the vision changes it makes clear the ways in which my craft or technique hasn’t kept up, the ways in which that skill is yet unable to express these new ideas. It challenges me and demands that I learn new things and do what I can to bring my skill and my vision to the same level as each other. But the very act of learning those new skills expands my imagination, gives me new ideas, and propels my vision, so when I wade back into the river, I find my vision already moving ahead of me, just out of reach. Again. And so it repeats in what would be an exasperating cycle of cause and effect if I refused to see the forward flow of things as not only inevitable but an opportunity for growth. The gulf between what we can imagine and the ways in which we can explore and express those ideas, whatever craft we use, can be an engine for our becoming the artists we are constantly becoming.
The alternative is decay and stagnation. Those are the two choices. We don’t get to choose whether the river keeps flowing or whether we keep changing. No amount of effort will dam it or divert it. But we do get to choose whether we get into the river and be alive to its motion and flow, or cling desperately to the shore in an attempt to stay right here, right at the last point on the river bank when things were working, when we felt more certain of our surroundings, even if it was an illusion and the river hasn’t been the same for years.
Clinging has never worked. The planet spins too hard and fast. The river moves too quickly. Our desire for things to remain the same, for the cherry blossoms to stay forever, is not only unrealistic, but heartbreaking when the blossoms fall as they always do. The Japanese idea of mono no aware frees us to feel sadness at the passing of the blooms, but also joy at the next stage in the life of the tree. It allows us to move forward, ever accepting of the natural rhythm of things. And there’s something else too. When we acknowledge the impermanence of the beautiful things, knowing they will be back, we are more free to acknowledge the impermanence of harder things, and look forward to their passing, knowing they will.
Scary as it is, we do not suffer because the river keeps flowing around us, nor that we too are subject to the same changes and flux. We suffer because we cling. We cling to what has been, to what has worked, to things and times and all the ought-to-have-beens and we miss the chance to wade into the changing waters and do what creativity has always done, find a way to become who we are becoming within the flow, and more practically, to solve current problems now without getting hung up on the past. Without wearing ourselves out by our efforts to cling to the shore.
I wrote this episode not because I had answers but questions. I wondered, and still do, if so many of our frustrations and hesitations as artists, creatives, or human beings come from the effort to step into the same river twice and the expectation that we'll find it unchanged. Do we make things harder for ourselves, because creativity always happens in uncertainty, when we try to control the flow and direction of that always changing, always moving river, rather than exploring and even celebrating that impermanence? Does our frustration and paralysis come from trying to cling to the riverbank and resisting that change? And when the change is so clear, and calls so hard to us, would it be easier to accept and follow if we acknowledged that we too had changed, or might still, and that all bets were off and all things were, if not possible, then at least not pre-determined by what once was? What would you do if you woke up to find you were a different person standing in a different river?
On a deeper level how much easier would it be to forgive others and ourselves for the past, if we acknowledged that everything has changed and that who we were is not who are or will become? How much easier would it be to take creative risks and try new things if we accepted that our past failures are not a guarantee more of the same? Nor, for that matter are past accomplishments a promise that everything we touch will turn to gold. What attachments would you release and how much less devastating would our losses be, if we clung less tightly and saw everything in our lives and our lives themselves like the cherry blossoms, more celebrated and anticipated and loved for their impermanence and beauty, not less. How much less might we fear?
The impermanence of all things means one thing above all to me: that now matters. That the person I am now, at this moment in my life and no other, is the one with the opportunity to be fully alive and to use that agency to create, now and not later, and to find joy in that creation and to do so without fear. Where the impermanence of things intersects with my ability to do and to act and to create, there is urgency. Now is when lives are lived. Not in the past, not in the future. You will never step into this river twice. Make it count.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0