Nothing is the Same by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
I recently went West back to my home town to look at wildflowers and
catch up with friends. It’s a funny thing to try to do really, for going back can never be achieved. One might return
to a place, but the place, like everything shaped by the flux and flow of time
and change, is not the same place.
This was particularly poignant for me in two ways: some old friendships,
it became clear, just don’t work anymore and the characteristics that I was
once attracted to, are now just irritating. Some old friendships, on the other
hand, remain buoyant and are a sheer pleasure to share in. These ones have
moved with the times and we have grown to another level together.
The other way was discovered in walking around the streets of my
childhood and youth. The last time I visited, this place was all spick and span
with new buildings and pavements and an atmosphere of get up and go. This time,
I had a sense of a decaying ghetto. The block of units now occupying the land on which my father
designed and built our house now looked run down (and all in a remarkably short
time). All the buildings in the street looked tired. The buildings that used to
be an eclectic mix of Federation, Californian, and modernist designs, held
together by loquat trees and rambling vines, are now boring units interspersed
with sad houses with weeds of wood sorrel and daisies, gone to wrack and ruin.
It seems the dreams of developers have somehow missed the mark, or else the
population is transient and not the sturdy suburban stalwarts of old.
Heraclitus (535- 475 BC) said, “You cannot step into the same bit of river
twice.” The water is different, the sand has changed and rocks worn down, the
flush of new growth has grown old, and the old has grown new and interesting slimes
and young fungi; there is nothing the same with this river that is life.
I inevitably wonder whenever I go back to the landscape of my youth
whether I should return there to live.
Every time, though, I cannot see why. I have made my home and my
clinical practice in the northern rivers and I like it here. There are almost
far too many memories back in the West for me to see the landscape afresh without
its archaeological digs of personal history, and I rather like only visiting those memories when I wish.
Yes, I know, it seems I am contradicting myself here. I recognize that all is
change, and that I cannot return to a time before the present, but that place
is redolent with memories and it is my mind that try to hold the place in
place.
I’m not any different from anybody else here. We all do it, but however much we try to keep
our place safe from change, it doesn’t work. The mutability of living is just
like water: impossible to keep in an unchanged form, forever.
It interests me that a symptom of depression and obsessive compulsive
disorder is the iteration, the doing or thinking of the same thing over
and over in a stuck way. Seeking to find sanctuary in the repeated now
doesn’t work. There is no peace here; iteration is just irritation and a
place of anxiety. How nice it is to let go into flow, to not hold back nor try
to hold still a pattern that, perhaps, used to be useful in times of stress.
How good it feels not to have to regurgitate those old things that do not
improve with time.
The substance of moving from this
moment to the next to the next to the next is the substance of the blood, flesh, bone and breath of life.
Nothing is the same. All is change and I rather like it.
