Change is the Only Constant

Perennial Meditations

The Dying Every Day series delivers guided meditations on the art of living. Each meditation provides a quote, a selected passage (from an original Stoic text), and a reflection prompt to consider. These meditations are designed to help you (and me) reflect on what it means to live a good life.

Change is the Only Constant

“The river where you set your foot just now is gone—those waters giving way to this, now this.” (often translated as “No one steps in the same river twice….”)

— Heraclitus, Fragments

Selected Passage

In this week’s meditation, we explore the art of living (and dying) through a selected reading from Seneca.

Infinitely swift is the flight of time, as those see more clearly who are looking backwards. When we are intent on the present, we do not notice it; so gentle is the passage of time’s headlong flight.

Do you ask the reason for this?

All past time is in the same place; it presents the same aspect to us; it lies together. Everything slips into the same abyss. Besides, an event that is a brief compass cannot contain long intervals. The time we spend in living is but a point, nay, even less than a point. But this point of time, tiny as it is, nature has mocked by making it seem outwardly of longer duration; she has taken one portion thereof and made it infancy, another childhood, another youth, another the gradual slope, so to speak, from youth to old age, and old age itself is still another. How many steps for how short a climb!

+ Adapted from On the Shortness of Life

Reflection Exercise

Consider reflecting on how you make sense of change. In his Meditations (or notes to himself), Marcus Aurelius observed that constant change is not something to fear. Why should we look anxiously at the prospect of change and dissolution? Change is in accordance with nature: “and nothing harmful is in accordance with nature.” How would your life transform if you started to embrace (and even cherish) change?

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