Time and Change, Our Only Constants
Considering the present, past, and future through the eyes of a child
I took my granddaughter to the library the other day. She loves it there. At 3-years-old she clearly thrives being around books and when it was time to leave, she chose, as she usually does, the ones she wanted to take home, all of them. The stack grew and grew, and soon it was teetering quite high on the short kids’ table.
“Let’s pick five,” I said. “Twenty might be a bit much right now.” Not sure why I limited her. Why not twenty? But that’s another essay.
I hope her love of books never changes. Still, change is inevitable, is it not?
I recently read a wonderfully thoughtful piece in The New Yorker about change entitled, “Are You the Same Person You Used to Be?”
Maybe, I thought. But maybe not?
The essay focused on childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and how events and experiences shape us, yet, how our core might just remain the same. We grow as both a “tree and a vine,” as the author wrote. “As the tree grows, the vine twines, finding new holds on the shape that supports it . . . we change, and change our view of that change, for as long as we live.”
What am I now at 68 that I was at 3-years of age?
My mother told me I was the kind of kid that didn’t mind being alone. I could “entertain myself,” as she put it. To this day, I like being alone. I like the time writing and thinking and reading in my shed. Is this part of the core of my being? Am I at least partly the same person I was so long ago?
I’m sure there are other aspects of my core self that remain. But change is inevitable. “Nothing stays the same,” my mother also said. She didn’t say this with any hint of melancholy, rather she said it with a sense of inevitability, a factual matter that we all should be ready to accept. “The only constant,” she said, “is change.”
There are times that my past self feels like a stranger. I think of Bob Dylan’s wonderful lyric: “I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.” Experience and time have permitted the unlocking of patterns and beliefs that through the years have been reevaluated and reimagined. What I might have believed long ago, I may not now. I thought like an “old man” then, and now, more like a young one—freer, more open. My core was partially shaped by my parents and my childhood neighborhood. My parents are dead. My old neighborhood is populated with others, people with new lives, new hopes, new backgrounds, new dreams. The old neighborhood is gone.
Change comes on feathered wings. It comes softly in the night when we sleep. But it’s also a pipe bomb, arriving unexpectedly, blowing everything up. Think divorce, death, war, trauma, college, marriage, children, travel, debt, fire, accidents, health, storms raging. Life changes us. It must. It’s a given.
Yet, something holds on, grasping true to our fullest self.
Walt Whitman’s words, “I am large, I contain multitudes" shows his belief that we are complex beings with thousands if not millions of different thoughts, emotions, and experiences, sometimes holding onto contradictory aspects of ourselves. And that means coming to terms with what we were and what we are, seeing that change is a constant thread. Still, some of us see the past as a kind of an anchor. Not an albatross, but a steady weight holding us true, keeping us on course. Others see the past as a foreign jungle, overgrown by tropical vines, creating a tangled and dense setting, one that may be, by our own doing or our own will, impenetrable.
It is unrealistic, even naive to believe that we can be who we always have been. And maybe we don’t want to be. Maybe we have worked for years to be someone different, consciously or unconsciously, for our own good. Or maybe we have tried to return to ourselves, the one of purity and innocence and honest hope, the child in us.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his novel The Sirens of Titan, ““Everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.” Maybe that’s how we all come to accept our individual journeys in life, that time and change are intertwined, inseparable like links in a chain. Maybe everything we have been, are, and will be is right in front of us, our old self and the newest version of us together in the here and now. Maybe who we were is exactly who we are now, and change is simply the constant in the continuum.
I’m going to take that thought with me when I’m at the library and my granddaughter’s nose is deep in a book. I will see her as she was, will be, and as she is right at the moment, all of it together, all aspects of her, every phase and age at once. She may not always be who she is right now, but I’m going to permit myself to believe that I’m not only seeing my granddaughter as her 3-year-old self, but I’m also seeing her as her entire self, ageless and limitless. I will accept that time is an illusion created only to make sense of our spatial existence on this earth.
If she’s a book lover now, she has always been, and always will be. I can believe in this through the tenets of quantum physics or through the unexplained magic of spirituality.
Or maybe simply accept that we truly are the same person that we’ve always been.
David W. Berner is the author of several books of award-winning fiction and memoir. His latest, Daylight Saving Time: The power of growing older is available now. His debut poetry collection, Garden Tools is due out in October 2025 from Finishing Line Press. His novella, American Moon will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2026.
This is wonderful, David! I like to think of change as layering, time summons change and the layers seem to quickly grow and we become more of ourselves. And the wee 3 year old has just begun!
👍