‘Awareism’
My Last Lunch with Mom, or, Why We Can’t Cross the Same River Twice
Scientists have wasted a lot of ink writing about the ‘arrow of time.’ They have because, according to their equations, time does not have an arrow. It can move forward or backward.
But, while ‘time’ may have no arrow denoting which way it should flow, experience does.
An old saying (attributed to the ancient philosopher, Heraclitus) says you can’t cross the same river twice because it’s a new river with different flowing water every time you cross.
By that reasoning, to cross the same river twice you’d have to go back in time to cross at the same ‘time’ you previously crossed. But, and this is a big ‘but,’ to go back in time and do that is to experience a present that includes, as part of it, that previous ‘present,’ making the current experience a new experience. So, even with an experience of the same water flowing past the crossing point, it’s not the same ‘present’ now that it was then, because the present that it was, which is now your past, did not include then, as part of it, the experience of itself being in your past.
It’s like if I were to go back to the last time I went out to lunch with my mom. It was just the two of us. I was 24-years-old and home on leave from the military. We met at her work in Pompano Beach, Florida. She’d been a stay-at-home mom for much of her life, and she was proud of her new job as a real estate agent.
Only a few short months later she passed away, unexpectedly.
That was over 40 years ago, and that trip home was the last time I ever saw her. So, to go back those 40 years and ‘relive’ that last lunch with my mom is to relive a different lunch because I’m not 24 anymore. If I could go back, now, forty years later, and ‘relive’ that lunch, it would be an altogether different lunch, an entirely different experience.
I wish she could have met my kids.
All of which is to say that you can’t cross the same river twice, not because it’s a different river, but because it’s a different you.
Different you, different experience.
Life is not a ‘creation.’ It’s not a ‘thing.’ If it was, we could go back, and like rebuilding a 50-year-old car, we could make it ‘new’ again. And we could rebuild it again, and again, and continually have the same car, be the same ‘me.’ But that’s not life.
Life is the experience of this creation that is our universe, our world, our life, our selves. It’s not the creation itself. To re-experience a thing, as opposed to rebuilding a thing, is not to replace it; it’s to build upon it.
