March 14
The river flows without ceasing, and yet its water is never the same.
An Account of My Hut (freely rendered)
Listening mode
The river flows without ceasing, and yet its water is never the same.
Years ago you promised someone something, as a matter of course. Now the day has come when you are meant to make good on it, and you notice that your reasons back then have become strange to you. Not wrong, just strange. Whoever made that promise did not yet know a great deal that you know by now.
The other person doesn't ask whether you are still the same. They remember your word, not the state you were in at the time. For them a line runs from that sentence to today, a line you can barely feel any more from the inside.
You could say that you have changed, and it wouldn't even be a lie. But then every promise would hold only as long as you didn't develop any further, which is to say hardly longer than a mood.
So perhaps you are not keeping the promise because you have stayed who you were. It could be just the other way round: you have become someone who can answer for an earlier person without quite being that person any longer.
You call and say that you're coming. Whether you would promise it again today, nobody asks you.
