A common theme has followed me the last little while. It has wound its way through my posts, my thoughts, and it seems in the daily discourse I have with songs I hear or poetry I read. It is the idea that as much as I try to hold on to the way things are, they are still in a constant rhythm of change. It reminds of Heraclitus’ quote: You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you. I find it is more complicated than that, as the same person cannot step into the river. With each ensuing moment, I change and the world I live in and with changes.
Yesterday, as I was driving home, Tommy Castro, a San Francisco blues performer, came on the radio with a song called It Is What it Is. The lyrics of the refrain go like this:
Yeah, I am what I am,
‘Cause I ain’t what I used to be.
‘Cause it is what it is,
But it ain’t what it used to be.
Sometimes, as much as I want things to remain the same or return to an idealized past, they cannot. Part of the reason, a big part, is I am not who I was a moment ago. Today, I flipped open one of the many books of poetry books I enjoy and found this William Stafford poem which echoed the lyrics above.
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you can do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
About ivonprefontaine
In keeping with bell hooks and Noam Chomsky, I consider myself a public and dissident intellectual. Part of my work is to move beyond (transcend) institutional dogmas that bind me to defend freedom, raising my voice to be heard on behalf of those who seek equity and justice in all their forms.
I completed my PhD in Philosophy of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. My dissertation and research was how teachers experience becoming teachers and their role as leaders.
I focus on leading, communicating, and innovating in organizations. This includes mindfuful servant-leadership, World Cafe events, Appreciative Inquiry, and expressing one's self through creativity. I offer retreats, workshops, and presentations that can be tailored to your organzations specific needs.
I published peer reviewed articles about schools as learning organizations, currere as an ethical pursuit, and hope as an essential element of adult eductaion. I published three poems and am currently preparing my poetry to publish as an anthology of poetry.
I present on mindful leadership, servant leadership, schools as learning organizations, how teachers experience becoming teachers, assessement, and critical thinking. I facilitate mindfulness, hospitality retreats. and World Cafe Events using Appreciative Inquiry.
I am writing and researching about various forms of leadership, how teachers inform and form their identity as a particular teacher, schools as learning organizations, hope, nonviolence and its anticipatory relationship with the future, as essential elements to teaching and learning.
Academic publications can be found at Ivon Gile Prefontaine on ResearchGate
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 
Thanks for this. I often think about the path we take in life and feel it opens in front of us, we can’t walk back. It’s always forward – and we change as we walk. And so does everything in the landscape.
Life is its own journey and it is taken one step at a time. That has been an incredibly difficult lesson for me to learn, so I find solace in the words of people like William Stafford.
You have a beautiful way with words, as did William Stafford. His poem made me sigh.
Thank you.
I have a phrase that I have tended to say quite a lot throughout the last decade or so; it comforts me and allows me to accept! ‘The only constant, is change’. Seems to work for me, Ivon….
I agree I tell people the three constants in life are death, taxes, and change.
So true, what you write here, Ivon. I think that this realization is part of growing up… we usually don’t realize that particular truth of constant change when we are children… even though that is one of the periods of our lives when the change is most dramatic. But I especially enjoyed the poem you brought from William Stafford. Because after considering the river that is never the same, and this addition you’ve pointed out here, that we ourselves are never the same either… it’s important to remember the lesson of Stafford, that there is a thread that doesn’t change… that ties us to our fate… perhaps an allegorical thread of DNA. Thank you for a very meaningful post.
Thank you for the response Shimon. It is hard some days to accept the way it is and I find much in the words of poets like Stafford.
Beautiful post . Some days I yearn to to back to what I used to be in some aspects of me but I cannot. I am never going to be not grey again 🙂 and now I embrace graceful aging. I will never be the 6 pack boy again and if the packs show up again they’ll be on an old man and the effects will never be the same. I embrace the little vanity and I embrace the newness.
That is a wonderful comment. Thank you for sharing deep insight into how living is continuous change and accepting it.