April 6
The river flows on without end, and yet its water is never the same. Where it pools, foam drifts: here a bubble dissolves, there a new one forms. It is no different with people and their dwellings.
An Account of My Hut (freely rendered)
Listening mode
The river flows on without end, and yet its water is never the same. Where it pools, foam drifts: here a bubble dissolves, there a new one forms. It is no different with people and their dwellings.
Of a friendship that has lasted many years, you might say that it has held. The word suggests something solid. And yet in all that time the two of you have hardly had the same conversation twice. What you used to talk about late into the night no longer comes up, and you laugh about things that didn't even exist back then.
Perhaps that is exactly why it has held. Had the friendship stayed with its first subjects, at some point it would no longer have found you. Lasting and staying the same are two different things; sometimes one even rules out the other.
It gets difficult because from the inside you can hardly tell whether something is changing or running out. Both happen quietly, in the gaps between two meetings, which grow a little longer, or don't. No moment announces that change has become an ending. Often it is only in hindsight that you call the one development and the other loss, depending on how things turned out.
At your next meeting, someone you have known for a long time sits across from you. Whether you still know them, the old conversations won't tell you.
