Continuity is one of the great mysteries of life; it is essential to identity. When you look at the waves on the shore, one after the other, they unfold in perfect pleated sequence. From the break of dawn, the day arises until the height of noon and then gradually falls to gather in the coloured shadow-basket of twilight. The seasons, too, follow the melody of forward unfolding. One of the most beautiful images of continuity and sequence is the river. Always in motion towards the ocean, it continues to look the same. As Heraclitus said, “You cannot step twice into the same river.” In a matter of seconds, both you and the river are different. The river is the ideal of continuity. It preserves the fluency of continual change and yet holds the one form. The river is so interesting because it offers a creative metaphor of the way the mind flows in and through experience. Your life is made up of a sequence of days. Each day brings something new and different. The secret of time’s intention and generosity depends on how your days follow each other. Every yesterday prepares you for today. What today brings could not have reached you yesterday or a hundred days ago. Time is more careful in its sequence than we often notice. Time ripens according to its hidden rhythm. In its heart, time is eternal longing.
Regardless of how you look back on your life, you cannot force it out of the order in which it has unfolded. You cannot de-sequence your life. The structure of your life holds together. That is the unnoticed miracle of memory; it is the intimate mirror of the continuity of your experience and presence. While you sleep, your memory continues to gather and store up every moment. If your memory had forsaken you moments before you awoke this morning, you would not recognize your family. And when you looked in the mirror, the face of a stranger would look back at you. If your memory were wiped, your world would evaporate. Continuity is difficult to grasp, because it is hidden and subtle. In a sense, we are powerless ever to break continuity. Even the severest and most shocking change insists on its belonging to the moments that preceded it. Then, even that shocking change in its turn builds the next bridge to the future. We try to understand and control continuity by calling it causality. We claim that every event has a cause. We attempt to understand the parts of the sequence in a clear and linear way. The difficulty here is our tendency to jump to conclusions about how one time or thing grows out of another in our lives. When we make the connections too easy for ourselves, we let the mystery, like sand, slip through the openings.