Once, a time traveller was contemplating his experience of sailing through time, "Ah, 2024—a year so riddled with twists and turns it could give a roller coaster an inferiority complex. If this year were a novel, it would be a page-turner, but one of those you’d read with one eye open. 'The only constant in life is change,' said Heraclitus, reflecting his philosophical perspective that the universe is in a constant state of flux. Heraclitus believed that everything in the universe is in a state of continuous transformation. Nothing remains static or unchanged. He illustrated this with the analogy of a river: 'You cannot step into the same river twice,' because the water flows and changes, just as the person stepping into the river is also changing. Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know.
Change is not just an occasional occurrence but a fundamental and universal law of existence. Heraclitus saw change as a driving force that shapes the cosmos, maintaining balance and harmony through a dynamic interplay of opposites (e.g., night and day, life and death). Accepting change as inevitable encourages adaptability and resilience, key traits for navigating life's uncertainties. This concept is profoundly applicable to life, as individuals constantly encounter transitions—ageing, shifting relationships, evolving goals, and external circumstances.
In modern psychology, embracing change is essential for personal growth and emotional well-being. Rapid technological advancements epitomize the truth of Heraclitus's words, as societies continuously adapt to new realities. Viewing change as an opportunity rather than a threat can foster growth and innovation.
'You must become who you are' implies growth and evolution, inherently tied to change. Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence suggests that the universe and all its events are in a state of infinite repetition, highlighting the dynamic and cyclical nature of existence. Nietzsche also championed the idea of embracing change and life's uncertainties through his philosophy of amor fati—' love of fate.' This involves accepting and affirming life’s constant transformations.
Bergson’s philosophy resonates with Heraclitus’s notion of flux, seeing life as a ceaseless unfolding of new forms. Bergson emphasized the concept of élan vital (vital force), which describes the creative and evolutionary process of life. He argued that life is not static but a dynamic flow of continuous change and growth.
Although not a philosopher in the traditional sense, Darwin’s theory of evolution underscores the idea of constant change as the engine of life. His scientific perspective supports the view that adaptation to change is necessary for survival, complementing Heraclitus's philosophical assertions. Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse.
'The more things change, the more they stay the same,' observed French novelist Alphonse Karr. While the world around you shifted, the essence of human resilience remained steadfast. You continued to adapt, navigate, and thrive despite the chaos. Men dig tons of earth to find an ounce of gold.
As spring blossomed, so did your adaptability skills. By now, you could pivot on a dime. Had a Zoom meeting scheduled at noon? No problem, because by then you had perfected the 'business on top, pyjamas (or even underwear) on the bottom' dress code. Spring, with its explosion of colour and life, symbolized renewal. The barren landscapes of winter transformed into fields of vibrant flowers, a testament to the power of change and new beginnings. Each blossom whispered a promise that no matter how harsh the winter, spring would always follow. It was a season of hope, where every bud represented a fresh start, encouraging you to embrace new opportunities with open arms. As Albert Camus so eloquently put it, 'In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.'
Winter began the year with a quiet stillness, teaching you the virtue of patience. As the world lay dormant under a blanket of snow, you learned that not all progress is visible. Beneath the frost-covered surface, seeds of future growth were quietly gathering strength. It was a reminder that sometimes, the most important work happens in silence, away from the spotlight.
Summer brought warmth and abundance, teaching you about harmony and balance. The long, sun-drenched days were a gentle nudge to find equilibrium in your own life. Nature was in full bloom, and so were you—cultivating a balance between work, rest, and play. The season reminded you that growth requires not just effort, but also moments of relaxation and joy. As John Muir once said, 'In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.'
Autumn, with its fiery hues and falling leaves, was a lesson in letting go. The trees shed their leaves in a graceful dance, showing you that there is beauty in release. It was a time to reflect on the year, to let go of what no longer served you, and to make space for new growth. The crisp air and golden light encouraged introspection and gratitude for the cycle of life. As the leaves fell, you found harmony in accepting change, recognizing that endings are just as natural as beginnings. Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher, captured this sentiment perfectly, 'The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.'
Through each season, natural phenomena like thunderstorms, gentle rains, and clear skies provided additional insights. A thunderstorm’s sudden intensity reminds you of the power and impermanence of challenges. A gentle rain nourished the earth and your spirit, demonstrating the importance of small, consistent efforts. Clear skies offered moments of clarity and perspective, a chance to see the bigger picture and find your place within it.
And the concept of a time machine—an alluring metaphor for our journey through life. In many ways, life itself can be seen as a time machine, continually transporting us through moments, memories, and experiences that shape who we are.
Imagine stepping into a time machine, setting the dial to any point in your past or future. This act of time travel is akin to reflection and anticipation, two vital components of the human experience. When we reflect on our past, we navigate through a mosaic of memories, each one a stepping stone that has led us to our present. Similarly, when we anticipate the future, we engage in the art of possibility, dreaming and planning for what lies ahead.
Back to Heraclitus, he says, 'Pythagoras may well have been the deepest in his learning of all men. And still, he claimed to recollect details of former lives, being in one a cucumber and one time a sardine. Of all the words yet spoken, none comes quite as far as wisdom, which is the action of the mind beyond all things that may be said. Of all the words yet spoken, none comes quite as far as wisdom, which is the action of the mind beyond all things that may be said. Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeates all things.' (from 'Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, translated by Brooks Haxton, 2001, Viking Penguin)
Reflection on the past is a powerful tool for growth. By revisiting moments of joy, sorrow, triumph, and failure, we gain insights that guide our present actions. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” This encapsulates the essence of our metaphorical time machine—by looking back, we derive meaning from our experiences, which in turn informs our journey forward.
'The past is history' is a saying that means that events that have already happened are finished and cannot be changed. It implies that people should focus on the present and the future and that they can learn from the past but cannot go back and change it.
Will and Ariel Durant in The Lessons of History (1996, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks) distil decades of historical analysis into universal themes and insights about the patterns and principles governing human history. Durants define history, in its troublesome duplexity, as the events or records of the past. Human history is a brief spot in space, and its first lesson is modesty. At any moment a comet may come too close to the earth and set our little globe turning topsy-turvy in a hectic course, or choke its men and fleas with fumes or heat; or a fragment of the smiling sun may slip off tangentially—as some think our planet did a few astronomic moments ago—and fall upon us in a wild embrace ending all grief and pain. We accept these possibilities in our stride, and retort to the cosmos in the words of Pascal, 'When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory, the universe knows nothing.'
Will and Ariel Durant in The Lessons of History (1996, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks) distil decades of historical analysis into universal themes and insights about the patterns and principles governing human history. Durants define history, in its troublesome duplexity, as the events or records of the past. Human history is a brief spot in space, and its first lesson is modesty. At any moment a comet may come too close to the earth and set our little globe turning topsy-turvy in a hectic course, or choke its men and fleas with fumes or heat; or a fragment of the smiling sun may slip off tangentially—as some think our planet did a few astronomic moments ago—and fall upon us in a wild embrace ending all grief and pain. We accept these possibilities in our stride, and retort to the cosmos in the words of Pascal, 'When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory, the universe knows nothing.'
Early Greek thinkers sought the stuff of which the world was made. For Thales, it was water; for Anaximenes, air; for Anaximander, a combination of hot and cold. Empedocles expanded the stuff to four indestructible elemental principles, while Anaxagoras is said to have proposed innumerable generative seeds composing the nature of things. The Atomists abstracted the seeds yet further, proposing multiple particles moving in a void. The Pythagoreans found the truth of the world lies in numbers, their proportions and relations, and Parmenides, the most metaphysical of them all, laid out his theory of the cosmos through the sheer power of logical thought.
Heraclitus took a different tack. His method is more psychological. He posited no basic substance, nor did he abstract the world of the senses into numbers, atoms, or assertions about Being as a whole. Instead, he said, nothing is stable; all is in flux. Whatever you say about anything, its opposite is equally true. He brought language into the game of cosmological thinking. Declarations will always be self-contradictory, relative, and subjective.
History, according to Durants, is subject to geology. Every day the sea encroaches somewhere upon the land, or the land upon the sea; cities disappear under the water, and sunken cathedrals ring their melancholy bells. Mountains rise and fall in the rhythm of emergence and erosion; rivers swell and flood, or dry up, or change their course; valleys become deserts, and isthmuses become straits. To the geologic eye all the surface of the earth is a fluid form, and man moves upon it as insecurely. Geography is the matrix of history, its nourishing mother and disciplining home. Its rivers, lakes, oases, and oceans draw settlers to their shores, for water is the life of organisms and towns, and offers inexpensive roads for transport and trade. Egypt was “the gift of the Nile,” and Mesopotamia built successive civilizations “between the rivers” and along their effluent canals. India was the daughter of the Indus, the Brahmaputra and the Ganges; China owed its life and sorrows to the great rivers that (like ourselves) often wandered from their proper beds and fertilized the neighbourhood with their overflow. Italy adorned the valleys of the Tiber, the Arno, and the Po. Austria grew along the Danube, Germany along the Elbe and the Rhine, France along the Rhone, the Loire, and the Seine. Petra and Palmyra were nourished by oases in the desert.
The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact; and only a similar combination can make a culture take form over a thousand natural obstacles. Man, not the earth, makes civilization.
The Durants emphasize how geography shapes civilizations, determining access to resources, trade routes, and natural defences. History is a fragment of biology: the life of man is a portion of the vicissitudes of organisms on land and sea. Sometimes, wandering alone in the woods on a summer day, we hear or see the movement of a hundred species of flying, leaping, creeping, crawling, and burrowing things.
Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious. superior ability desires freedom; and in the end, superior ability has its way.
Durants argue that Morals are the rules by which a society exhorts (as laws are the rules by which it seeks to compel) its members and associations to behave consistent with its order, security, and growth. A little knowledge of history stresses the variability of moral codes and concludes that they are negligible because they differ in time and place, and sometimes contradict each other. A larger knowledge stresses the universality of moral codes and concludes with their necessity. Moral codes differ because they adjust themselves to historical and environmental conditions.
Durants say, History, according to Karl Marx, is economics in action—the contest, among individuals, groups, classes, and states, for food, fuel, materials, and economic power. Political forms, religious institutions, and cultural creations are all rooted in economic realities. So the Industrial Revolution brought with it democracy, feminism, birth control, socialism, the decline of religion, the loosening of morals, the liberation of literature from dependence upon aristocratic patronage, the replacement of romanticism by realism in fiction—and the economic interpretation of history. The outstanding personalities in these movements were effects, not causes; Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hector would never have been heard of had not the Greeks sought commercial control of the Dardanelles; economic ambition, not the face of Helen “fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,” launched a thousand ships on Ilium; those subtle Greeks knew how to cover naked economic truth with the fig leaf of a phrase.
History has a good word to say for all forms of government, and government in general. Since men love freedom, and the freedom of individuals in society requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos. So the prime task of government is to establish order; organized central force is the sole alternative to incalculable and disruptive force in private hands. Power naturally converges to a centre, for it is ineffective when divided, diluted, and spread, as in Poland under the liberum veto; hence, the centralization of power in the monarchy by Richelieu or Bismarck, over the protest of feudal barons, has been praised by historians. A similar process has centred power in the federal government in the United States; it was of no use to talk of “states’ rights” when the economy was ignoring state boundaries and could be regulated only by some central authority. Today international government is developing as industry, commerce, and finance override frontiers and take international forms.
Durants concluded that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view, all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.
However, just as a time machine allows us to visit different eras, it also teaches us the importance of living in the present. The present moment is the only place where life truly unfolds, and our reflections on the past or dreams for the future should not overshadow the beauty of now. As the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle reminds us, 'Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.'
My session in this first part is about to end, so before we move on to the second session, allow me to sing "Mesin Waktu" by Budi Doremi,
Kalau harus ku mengingatmu lagi
[If I must remember you once more]
Aku takkan sanggup dengan yang terjadi pada kita
[ I can't endure what happened to us before]
Jika melupakanmu hal yang mudah
[If forgetting you were simple and light]
Ini takkan berat, takkan membuat hatiku lelah
[It wouldn't be heavy, nor tire my heart's fight]
