CREATED BY FLUX, ANCHORED IN CHANGE

I was stopped at a traffic light at an intersection I've passed through a thousand times over the years. I look ed across the street and realized that the shop on the opposite corner had changed hands once more. I remember when it was a flower shop owned by a man who sang opera, followed by a vintage clothing store, followed by two or three businesses that didn't last long. Now I saw it had been updated in a very snazzy style and although I couldn't tell just what was inside, I knew it had to be something very trendy.
   The light changed and I drove on thinking about the visual overlay of the streets of my city I carry with me, a stack of acetate sheets my memory lifts to reveal what came before. There is much more to the overlay than I have seen; change went on before my time and will continue after. But there is something very moving for me in stepping back to see the various iterations, the slowly evolving change. It connects me to the deep flowing river of experience that washes over us all. 
     This set me thinking about my own slow evolution, the way I got from there to here. I can see the whole arc, the many eras - when I was in school or was married or lived in New York or... Like everyone else, I carry a sense of continuity, a continuous consciousness (which William James called "the stream of consciousness") so that my sense of myself remains constant. I always know that I am me. But I can't snatch a single isolated moment of this "me" - it's gone even as I reach for it.  
     Still, I know I have a story. It's the narrative of all the steps taken and not taken, of choices that were productive and others which weren't, of things remembered and forgotten, of love given and withheld and received - all of it teaching me lessons when I'm ready for them, the lessons of change.
     I am the process of evolution and I'm also an organic whole, without tears or disjunctions. Past, present, future; the whole of me arises from moment to moment, created by flux, anchored in change.