A Stoic Take on Mental Health: The River
An ancient Greek philosopher, named Heraclitus, once said “Change is the only constant in life” – I couldn’t find that to be any more realistic to our lives today years later. We are constantly learning, understanding, seeing, challenging, moving, running, all over the place through our busy lives in college. Aside from the major life transitional change of moving into college, life even aside from academia moves faster and faster each day. With club involvement, spending time with friends, and everything else.
With the changes we see in our lives, we reflect back on all of the circumstances and choices that have led to this moment and all the changes we hope to have in the future. From my experiences, this is such an integral part of what anxiety is that we all deal with – not living and appreciating the moment. But with major changes, anxiety and stress are completely understandable – but it’s important to put them into perspective.
Marcus Arelius’s book (chapter) 6 of Meditations depicts and reveals a perspective on change in our lives:
“15. Some things are rushing into existence, others out of it. Some of what now exists is already gone. Change and flux constantly remake the world, just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity. We find ourselves in a river. Which of the things around us should we value when none of them can offer a firm foothold? …”
What insight can this bring to us? If we use Marcus’s analogy of a river towards our perspective towards change it makes sense. With one lens, Change is the river, which is a completely natural thing we cannot control our go against the tide. In another sense, the river itself is our lives with respect to time – and the tide moving us forward is the change that continually happens.
From stoic philosophy alongside the chapters of Meditations, I’ve realized more than the stereotypical & clique phrase “accepting change” but rather embracing it as the present moment and living confidently within it. Change really is our only constant in life. To conclude, later in book 7 of Meditations we see Marcus tie in another universal statement that relates back to the relationship between change and time:
“37. If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything – been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.”
As I remind myself that this idea around change’s relationship with time, has been instrumental for me personally as of lately.
I would argue that stoic philosophy could also do the same for others; Remembering that change is natural and instrumental to life itself helps bring clarity and perspective to our lives through the river of time and currents of change.
Ethan McCarthy | Student at Penn State University | 10/31/23