You Can't Step In The Same River Twice

When I was young, I learned the saying "you can never step in the same river twice." I believed than (and still do) that it was mostly about the fact that the river is constantly changing. But recently I read an article that included a casual reference to the fact that "you" can never step in the same river twice either, because the "you" at 25 is not the "you" at 30, or 58. For that matter, the "you" on Monday isn't the same as the "you" on Tuesday.

This was brought home to me extremely clearly as I went through my journals from 1976 and 1977. The guy who wrote those journals lived in the places I lived, and went through the experiences I went through, but I recognize almost nothing of his dreams, plans and emotional state. He was a very passionate, enthusiastic, insecure and driven young man. I'm not sure I'd enjoy meeting him.

Versions of this trope appear in literature as well. Leslie Poles Hartley began his novel The Go-Between (1953), "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." That trope has been around my whole life. It is true. As Thomas Wolfe put it in 1940, You Can't Go Home Again.

The 2010 BBC/PBS television series Any Human Heart (based on the William Boyd novel) dealt with the same issue visually: the older Logan Mountstuart stood by a river and saw himself at 5, 20 and 30 on the opposite shore, each prior self standing next to the other. It really brought home the idea, and I have been thinking about it regularly ever since.