You Are Never The Same
Nay, even in the life of the same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is called the same, and yet in the interval between youth and age, and in every stage of life, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation, hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing.
These words come from Socrates, recounting a lesson taught to him years earlier by the priestess Diotima of Mantinea. The setting is a symposium, a drinking party at the house of the poet Agathon, where guests take turns praising Love while wine and conversation flow late into the night. Diotima is explaining why mortal beings chase immortality through children, fame, and ideas, since nothing that lives can stay fixed in one form. Her point lands just as hard now as then: the body you woke up in today is not the one you had ten years ago, and it will not be the one you have ten years from now.
Reflection
Diotima taught Socrates that no living thing stays fixed forever. What change am I currently moving through in my own life?