I have a confession, and I’d like to get it out of the way before anybody thinks better of me.
I wear my headphones in coffee shops and I don’t always have anything playing.
There. It’s out. I’m not proud of it. I’d love to tell you it’s a boundary thing, that the headphones are a polite little fence that says I’m working, please don’t, and that’s about forty percent true. The other sixty percent is that people say the most extraordinary things to each other at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday and I am, apparently, a person who wants to hear it.
So on Tuesday I was two tables over with a cortado and an empty document, and there were two men having the kind of conversation you can hear from two tables over.
The older one was doing most of the talking. He had that voice men get when they’ve decided the moment calls for wisdom — a little slower than his regular voice, I’d guess, with pauses in it. The younger one was maybe twenty-five and had the good manners to look like he was receiving something.
Here’s the situation, as best I could reconstruct it while pretending to have a document open: the young man used to work in an industry. He’d left it. He was thinking about going back. And he wasn’t sure, because the thing he’d left had changed while he was gone, and he was afraid he’d walk back in and find that it wasn’t there anymore.
And the older gentleman leaned back and told him you can’t step in the same river twice.
Which — okay. I want to be fair to him. It’s a good line. It’s Heraclitus, more or less, and it’s survived two and a half thousand years because it’s true. Everything moves. The water you touched is somewhere past Pittsburgh by now. You’ve changed too. Nobody gets to go backward.
It also fit, which is the part that bothered me. That industry had changed. He had changed. The metaphor landed on the facts almost exactly, and that’s usually the sign of a good metaphor, and it’s sometimes the sign of a metaphor that’s about to do some damage.
Because I was sitting there thinking about what the young man actually had. He had years in that work. He had the vocabulary. He knew who to call and what the bad months looked like and which parts of it are always going to be miserable no matter who’s running things. He had a head start, and what he was being handed was a very elegant reason to believe the head start didn’t count.
And I thought: it’s still a river.
That’s the whole thing. The water is different, the banks have moved, some of it silted up and some of it cut a new channel — and it is still, unmistakably, the same river. You can find it on a map. It has a name. The thing that makes it a river is going on doing what rivers do, which is precisely why you can’t step in it twice.
I sat with that for probably ten minutes and did nothing about it, because I am not a person who talks to strangers. I want to be clear about that. I’m a person who thinks of the right thing on the drive home.
Then they got up, and the older man went out, and the younger one stayed at the table a second longer, doing something with his phone that I don’t think required doing.
So I pulled one side of my headphones off — the empty side, since we’ve established I have no secrets left — and I said: “Maybe you can’t step in the same river twice. But it’s still a river.”
He looked at me. There was a pause I did not enjoy.
Then he said thank you, and he laughed a little, and he left.
That’s it. That’s the entire story. I’m aware it’s not much of one. But I’ve thought about it every day since, and I’d like to say two things about it that might be worth more than the anecdote.
The first is for anyone standing at the edge of something they used to be inside. The change is real. Don’t pretend the water is the same water. But you know the shape of the channel, and you know where it’s deep, and that is not nothing — that’s most of what anybody has.
The second is smaller and it’s for me. I almost didn’t say it. I had a good line, a clear view of somebody who could use it, and my whole body’s first instinct was to let him walk out the door so I could avoid eight seconds of being perceived.
I’d like to be the kind of person who says the thing. I got it right once, on a Tuesday, wearing headphones playing nothing.
We’ll see about Wednesday.
Stay warm. Stay kind. Stay caffeinated.
