Same place

When a child, I came across this and did not get it

“one cannot bathe in the same river twice” .

To my ignorance, I dove into the waters, splashing with all the gusto of life. One cannon ball then another.

Later, when I came back to the same river. My city. Then I saw a different parade. Times had changed. No longer did I see my “Cinema Paradiso”.

Then it dawn on me: one can always go back to the same place, but not that same time. The fourth dimension cannot be re-captured or reproduced. The lenses of our mind eyes are wide-opened, but our body is wrapped in physical space, unable to move with time lapse.

Stranger and sojourner in my own town.

Simply because time has moved on.

“One cannot dip one’s toe into the same river twice”…It’s gone, that minute when I conceived this blog. And now, the revision.

Thoughts flown. Energy spent. The bills ticking. Come due at the end of the month. Reality.

The price paid for inaction, for being mis-informed (or dis-informed) or mis-fortuned.

To bear great responsibilities. To be authentic.

To be one’s real self. Not someone else’s life. Parent’s or sibling’s, teacher’s or preacher’s.

Yours. Best and unique gift to and from the world.

Wear your cap backward if you like (the Sun might be behind you).

Judge not.

Everyone is struggling to find him/herself. Research shows it’s those secondary connections who influence us more than the direct links (perhaps because we are prone to re-act, re-bel and re-direct from being told).

In the Orient one has no choice but to be part of a “tribe” or an extended families.

My brother often praised our cousins for having read a library full of French and English books (I must give it to them: inter-racial marriage, lecturer of Madison, WI’s high school, with specialty subject as English – albeit born a native Vietnamese).

Because of those seemingly casual remarks and unexpected hints, I ended up amassing foreign language myself, in my cousins’ footsteps. Meanwhile, my brother was inspired by another cousin who turned down a cabinet-level job offer, inter-racially married to a French woman, and gave half of his salary to poor students in Paris.

We don’t control all the levers. Individualism is a myth. It’s unseeming that those loosed connections somehow alter the course of our lives more than our direct links.

We find ourselves deeply entrenched (by rationalizing or succumbed to self-delusion) as creatures of habits (giving, for instance). Voila. In time, those not-too-free choices cemented themselves. Stuck. Railway route. Destiny unalterable.

Once, I didn’t quite get that quote.

I kept coming back to the same river, expect to find old times (A la reserche du temps perdu). Only to find something vaguely familiar. A sense of Deja vu. But that’s about it.

One can come back to the same place but never the same times. The past comes only in selective memory.

I squandered time to find it while the parade of change marches on, in different color and to a different tune. Same place, same town, different destiny.

No way to bathe in the same river twice. Now I get it.