The River We Cannot Step Into Twice

Heraclitus is often credited with the saying that we cannot step into the same river twice.

The river may look the same.

The rocks may still be beneath our feet.

The trees may still lean over its banks.

The water may still be cold enough to make us gasp.

But the water has moved on.

And so have we.

This weekend, we are away as a family to celebrate my husband’s birthday. There have been new places to explore, new views to take in, a river or two cold enough that we will stand at its edge arguing about who is brave enough to put their feet in first.

There is something deeply ordinary and precious about this.

To be together.

To laugh.

To wander somewhere unfamiliar.

To feel cold water around our ankles and remember that our bodies are here, in this moment, alive to the world.

And yet I find myself carrying another landscape with me.

While we are away, my own family in Ireland is moving through a significant and painful transition.

It has caused me to be reflecting on the complicated childhood river that I grew up in.

Perhaps one of the hardest things about becoming an adult is realising that we don’t simply leave childhood behind.

We carry its lessons in our bodies.

We carry the ways love was given and withheld.

We carry the ways conflict was handled.

We carry what was spoken and what was never spoken.

We carry the roles we learned to occupy in order to survive our families.

And then, somehow, we find ourselves parents ourselves.

To love our own children differently.

To apologise when we get it wrong.

To listen rather than control.

To create safety where perhaps there wasn’t much of it before.

To learn a new language for love.

It is a strange kind of work: learning how to parent from within the very people who once taught us what parenting was.

And perhaps this is part of what makes this season so tender.

Because I am not only hearing how my family enter a new chapter.

I am also looking back at the chapters that formed me.

There is grief there.

Some of it is grief for what happened.

Some is grief for what didn’t happen.

And some is grief for the relationship with my mother that I have longed for but have not been able to have.

Since having leukemia, I have experienced a reflection on who I call family.

Illness has a way of stripping life back to what matters.

It makes you notice who comes close, who stays, who reaches out and who doesn’t.

There are wounds that become particularly visible when we are vulnerable.

And sometimes the people we hoped would be there, are simply not able .

That has been a painful learning.

I cannot make another person become the mother I needed.

I cannot go backwards and change the family I was born into.

I cannot make the river run upstream.

But perhaps I can decide how I step into the water now.

This weekend, I want to notice that.

I want to be present to the family I have been given and the family I have helped to create.

I want to celebrate my husband.

I want to laugh with my children.

I want to explore somewhere new.

I want to stand beside a freezing river and feel the shock of cold water against my feet

Because this river will never be here again.

Not exactly like this.

And neither will I.

The child I once was will not step into it.

I will step into it as the person I am becoming.

Perhaps that is what Heraclitus was pointing towards.

Life is not a series of places we can return to unchanged.

We revisit people, we revisit memories, and we revisit old landscapes.

But we arrive carrying everything that has happened since the last time.

The river has moved, and so have we.

Maybe healing isn’t always about finding our way back to the place where the hurt began.

Maybe sometimes it is about learning to stand on a new riverbank.

To feel the cold water.

To recognise the people beside us.

To let what cannot be changed remain behind us, while still allowing it to teach us something.

And then, when we are ready

to step in.

The Catlins , Aotearoa , New Zealand - A great place to visit