πάντα ῥεῖ
past, present, future
Past, present, and future… what we have finished living, what we are living now, and what we will live sooner or later; and yet, sometimes it is not that simple. Sometimes, even though this timeline seems so clear, we are unable to leave the past behind, to live the present to the fullest, and to feel confident about our future.
There are moments from the past that we barely remember, and others that, instead, we just cannot seem to let go of.
Moments in our everyday present that wash over us like a cold shower, and others that, conversely, we linger in, like a warm bath with scented candles on a rainy day.
Of course, not every situation, experience, or moment carries the same weight, but sometimes the reason why is not clear at first glance. Like when we are little, and our mind singles out specific moments that, like indelible images, stick in our minds… on what basis does this selection happen? One of the most vivid memories I have dates back to when I was three years old. I was on vacation with my parents and, from one of those random toy dispensers you used to find on the street at the seaside, they got me a Hello Kitty keychain. It was definitely not a groundbreaking or significant moment in my life; yet, I can’t get it out of my head. What could that be down to? I just can’t wrap my head around it. In my junior year of high school, I went through a really difficult time, and the paradox is that my mind has blocked out almost every memory of that year; I only keep a few fleeting images of what happened. And yet, a part of me has never moved on, and sometimes I find myself rethinking or even dreaming about that period in the vain hope of grasping new pieces of information, as if for an entire year I had been an outside spectator to my own life. It fascinates and unnerves me how little control, deep down, we have over our minds and how little this situation can be improved.
Perhaps these three macro-groups—past, present, and future—are a bit reductive compared to the complexity of life. Time exists and flows because we decided it was necessary to measure it, and of course, this has greatly benefited everyday communal living, but sometimes it is necessary to look a bit beyond what we are used to seeing. Life flows inexorably before our eyes—πάντα ῥεῖ, as Heraclitus used to say—but everything remains interconnected. And sometimes, no matter how much we would like to leave the past behind, it is simply not possible, because it is intrinsically linked to our present right now. In fact, it is our very present, just younger by some time, from which, just as we could not escape before, we cannot escape now either.