THE RIVER CHANGES. YOU CHANGE. WHY DOES YOUR LIFE ACT AS IF NOTHING CHANGES?

A silent paradox operates at the center of your existence: you believe you live the same day repeatedly, when in fact you have never stepped into the same moment twice. The illusion of continuity seduces your perception, making you assume that tomorrow will be merely a slightly modified version of today. Yet, with every breath, you traverse an absolutely virgin territory of human experience — and ignore this silent revolution happening in your cells, your thoughts, your relationships.
The water flowing through your fingers at this exact second is not the same that flowed an instant ago. Your cells renew themselves, your synapses reconfigure, the invisible agreements that sustain your relationships are renegotiated with every exchange of glances. You are not who you were when you began reading this paragraph. And yet, you insist on behaving as if you inhabited a fixed identity, navigating a stable world, sustaining immutable bonds. This contradiction between what you are and what you imagine yourself to be defines a large part of your suffering.
The human mind has developed a stunning capacity to create narratives of permanence over a fundamentally fluid reality. You name things, people, situations — and then forget that the name is not the thing named. You call someone a partner, colleague, friend, and presume that this word captures something solid, when it merely marks an instant of relational configuration that is already transforming as you pronounce the designation. The territory constantly changes; the mental map ages in the drawer of consciousness.
Observe your professional career through this lens. The organization that hired you no longer exists — its processes evolved, its leadership changed, its strategic objectives recalibrated. You signed a contract with an entity that vanished weeks later, replaced by another corporate configuration that maintains the same name on the door. And you also transformed: your skills expanded or atrophied, your values refined or corrupted, your ambitions matured or withered. Two completely distinct entities pretend to maintain an agreement established in the past by versions of yourselves that no longer inhabit the present.
Resistance to the flow is born from this ontological nostalgia — you want to be recognized as the same person, you want your relationships to remain unchanged, you yearn for stability in a universe that knows only movement. But this pursuit not only fails; it distances you from the only available experience: this irrepeatable moment you sacrifice trying to reconstitute what has already dissolved or anticipate what does not yet exist.
Think of the emotional endings that marked your trajectory. You did not lose the person you loved — you lost the version of them that existed at the moment of rupture, which was already different from the one at the start of the relationship, which will never be accessible again because that instant evaporated. The grief is not for the person, but for the impossibility of revisiting that specific configuration of affection, context, and presence. You cry not for who is gone, but for your own inability to accept that you could never retain something that was never fixed.
The same dynamic permeates your corporate frustrations. The promotion you didn’t get, the recognition that didn’t come, the project that failed — all of that belongs to a version of the organization, the market, yourself that has completely dissolved. You carry resentments about ghosts, nurture expectations based on extinct realities, plan futures using maps of territories that have disappeared. Your vital energy drains through this temporal hole where you insist on inhabiting all times, except the present.
The release from this self-imposed prison does not require extraordinary effort — it only demands the radical honesty of recognizing what is already happening. You do not need to learn to accept change; you need to stop pretending it is not occurring. Transformation is not a future event to prepare for, but the basic fabric of reality you experience every microsecond. Resisting this is as futile as trying to prevent your cells from renewing or your heart from beating.
When this comprehension penetrates not only your intellect but your way of inhabiting the world, something fundamental reorganizes itself. You stop demanding that people remain the same to justify your staying beside them. You stop expecting the organization to honor promises made by power structures that no longer exist. You abandon the fiction that you need to be consistent with decisions made by a version of yourself that operated with completely different information, values, and circumstances.
This posture does not imply passivity or a lack of commitment. On the contrary: it releases a much deeper responsibility — that of responding authentically to each moment as it presents itself, not as you would like it to present itself. You can make agreements, plan, commit — but without the illusion that these agreements freeze reality. They are poetic gestures of intention in a field of possibilities that continuously reconfigures itself.
Professionally, this translates into an existential agility that transcends methodologies and frameworks. You stop defending positions because in the past they made sense. You abandon projects that absorbed years of your life when the context that justified them evaporated. You reformulate your professional self-image not as a betrayal of your history, but as fidelity to the movement that has always been operating beneath the surface of your certifications and titles.
In affective bonds, this lucidity dissolves most conflicts arising from the frustrated expectation of permanence. You stop demanding that the other be who they were when you met. You stop blaming yourself for not feeling today what you felt three years ago. You understand that love is not a static feeling to be preserved, but a dance that reinvents itself with every encounter — or that ends when the dancers lose the common rhythm, without this invalidating the beauty of what was lived while it lasted.
The greatest personal revolution happens when you finally understand that there is no essential identity to protect or develop. You are a process, not a thing. A verb, not a noun. A continuous activity of configuration and reconfiguration that only stops with the last breath. Trying to fix yourself in a definition is like trying to hold water with open hands — the effort not only fails, but prevents you from fully experiencing the sensation of flowing between your fingers.
Look at the crises you go through — personal, professional, relational. They are not anomalies that interrupt your normal life; they are life revealing itself as it truly is. The mistake is not in the crises, but in your expectation that existence should be something other than this perpetual rearrangement of forms, functions, and meanings. You suffer not because of the changes, but because of your refusal to recognize that change is all that exists.
This understanding offers no cheap comfort nor magical solutions. It merely returns you to reality as it operates — relentlessly present, irrevocably new, absolutely generous in its infinite offer of fresh starts. Each instant is a blank page where you can write a different response, not because you deliberately choose to transform yourself, but because transformation is what you are when you stop resisting what has always been happening.
The river water follows its course, indifferent to your concepts of permanence. You can spend the rest of your life trying to capture it in a mental photograph, or you can dive into it with the totality of your present being — knowing that this dive, this moment, this specific configuration of you meeting the current will never repeat itself. The choice is not between changing or remaining; it is between consciously denying or fully inhabiting the movement that constitutes you.
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