The Stoics

Yesterday I was attempting to console my daughter through the end of a friendship without making much headway. I talked about how most relationships at 18 will be entirely forgotten at 36, and that what seems painful and dire now may strike her as comically dramatic in the near-future, the mystifying degree to which she thought she once cared, how deep in a pond she was, floating up to her eyes in the immediacy of it, searching for turtles with her toes. I tried to explain that she will have dozens of more "selves" to come, amalgams of interests and desires and perspectives that will be wholly different than what she values today, that the notion of continuity, of a static self is just the brain's way of not going mad in the face of incomprehensible change, but also the frighteningly limited time we have to scratch at the edges of comprehension. You'll be surprised to hear none of that was helping. So I made tea and just sat there, the mute listener at least providing some proximal support. Until I remembered a quote from Heraclitus I'd read long ago. "Listen," I said, "No woman steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and she is not the same woman." The tears paused. She thought about it for a while, nodded, and then we went for sushi. The unagi-asparagus roll rocked! Spreading another layer of wasabi with a wooden chopstick, I couldn't get over what an amazing thing it was, aside from the impromptu gender contemporizing, that a nearly three thousand year-old pre-Socratic Greek who lived in Persia could not only elbow his way into our conversation, but with an oracular utterance do ten times the parenting I was able to muster. There may not be static selves, but there's definitely a continuum of wisdom. At least until you consider that, in an attempt to cure himself of dropsy, Heraclitus covered his entire body in dung and was eaten by dogs. I launched into this little-known anecdote, but she already had earbuds in, halfway through the latest "Dance Moms," so I chewed away instead, pleased that all was at least right-ish with the world.