Why you can’t step in the same river twice

You probably know the quote “No man steps in the same river twice”, attributed to Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived around 500BC. It is often stated as an aphorism to explain how everything around us is constantly changing. It may seem somewhat self-evident; we all recognise how quickly things change. But part of the richness of the river metaphor is that the river looks the same from minute to minute, despite the fact that it is constantly flowing. The banks of the river give it shape, but the river itself is constantly moving.

By stepping into the river you have also changed the river, even if only in a small way.

But there is a second part to this quotation that is usually omitted. The full quotation is:

No man steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man

For me, this is a far more powerful message for it emphasises that we too are constantly changing. When we step into the river of our everyday lives, we are always entering it afresh. We are never the same person, even from moment to moment. Of course, it is in our nature to feel that we are somehow constant and fixed; we construct a sense of self that appears enduring. We have a narrative that explains our lives and somehow makes sense to us. It is always easy in retrospect to see how we arrived at this moment. The poet Antonio Machado summed it up as follows:

Traveller, there is no path,

The path is made by walking.

Our memories are also just reconstructions of the past. We don’t recall memories, we construct them afresh each time we recall them, changing them with each recollection, adding something new from our current experience and also forgetting some detail or other. In this regards, our memories are also like the river that we can not step into twice. Then past we recall is always the past as currently lived.

I like to use the metaphor of music to describe our sense of self. The current note is exists and is understood always in the context of what has come before and in anticipation of where it will lead. Even when we are unaware of it, we are never simply listening to what we are hearing in the moment. We are always placing it in the context of what we have heard up to this moment. The music we hear is never isolated; if it were then it would not make any sense and would simply not be music at all. It is the past and future that make it music in the first place.

Both the river and us are of the same stuff. We are both water.