We often speak of finding ourselves, as if the self were a fixed point waiting to be uncovered. But what if there is nothing static to find — only a movement to witness? Every moment we live, we change: new thoughts form, old beliefs fade, emotions rise and fall. The person reading these words is not the same as the one who began the paragraph. Yet we still call both “me.” Why? Perhaps because change itself is the only constant we can truly claim.
The idea of a static self offers comfort — it suggests stability, a core identity that endures despite the shifting tides of time. It allows us to say “this is who I am.” But such stability may be more wish than fact. If the self were fixed, it could not learn, adapt, or grow. To exist at all may require motion — the endless negotiation between who we were, who we are, and who we might become.
Philosophers from Heraclitus to Sartre have pointed toward this flux. For Heraclitus, “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” because both man and river are in ceaseless transformation. Sartre later expanded this into the notion of existence before essence — that we are not born with a fixed nature, but create ourselves through action and choice. Identity, then, is not discovered but made — continuously, precariously, through living itself.
Yet this dynamic view of existence also unsettles. If nothing within us stays still, can we ever say we are anyone at all? Perhaps the truth lies not in choosing between stillness and motion, but in realizing that being is both: a rhythm between the two, like breath — the inhale of self-definition, and the exhale of change.
To exist is not to be something static, but to become — again and again, moment by moment.
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