A strange thought: I will be leaving home and going to college. I guess I'm all grown up now, or should be, or will never be. We look at the future and think that there will come a definitive moment,some second, in which we will know that our lives have changed for ever-- some moment in which we we realize "I am changing, now, in this second." But that's not to be.
It's the nature of change to fool us. Time and destiny lull us into believing that we are the sole arbitrators of out fate, that we control personality. We like to map our futures out-- not just our five year plans: we plan our personalities.
But, as in the words of Marcus Aurelius, "All is flux." Perception, reality, time, and personality are a river whose bed lies too deep for our short legs to reach. While we draw air we will change; we achieve constancy only upon death, if even then.
So yes: in this second, I am changing. I can control the flow of this river only so much. I flow now towards adulthood, but it is the very nature of this travel -- floating asleep in a river-- that I will not know when I am arrived. Who wakes one morning and says with unshakable conviction, "I am now an adult:" who but the child?
2 comments:
Love that last line. It reminds me of Zoe saying she's a "big girl"--we only feel a need to assert ourselves as a certain age or status, I think, when we haven't yet reached it. I've found that I only notice change/adulthood when looking back on earlier periods of my life. And adulthood is not static--you're one kind of an adult in college, another married, another as a parent, etc.
I didn't realize you'd been blogging! I've enjoyed reading these and will add you to my reader.
Yea, I know my blogging is rather sporadic, but I have been trying to be more consistent. I love your insight, Rache.
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