FLUITO

You are not the same person who started reading this sentence.

This is meant literally. In the few seconds it took, thousands of cells in your body died and thousands of new ones took their place. Across a whole day the count runs into hundreds of billions. The lining of your gut renews itself every few days, your skin every few weeks. Much of the water in you now will be gone within a fortnight, replaced by whatever you drink.

The Roman poet Ovid ended his great book of transformations, the Metamorphoses, with a long speech he gave to the philosopher Pythagoras. The old man looks at the whole world and sees nothing standing still. Rivers, seasons, bodies, cities. Cuncta fluunt, he says. Everything flows. Every shape we see is formed only to pass.

Ovid finished the book around the year 8 AD, the same year the emperor Augustus sent him into exile in a cold town on the Black Sea. He never saw Rome again. He probably understood better than most how quickly a life can change its shape.

We usually resist this idea. We like to think of ourselves as fixed: a name, a face, a set of opinions, a story that holds together. Yet the people who knew you at seven, at seventeen and at forty would describe three quite different people, and all of them would be right.

You are less a thing than a pattern the river keeps drawing.

Seen this way, change stops being a threat and becomes the ordinary state of things. The mistake you made last year was made by someone who no longer quite exists. The habit you want to break is held in place by cells that will be gone by spring. None of this makes change easy. It does make it possible, in a very literal sense.

The water in a river is never the same from one moment to the next, and still we recognise the river. Its banks hold it, its course holds it, and above all its movement holds it. Stop the movement and you have a pond.

FLUITO is written inside that current: a rhythm that never quite settles, a melody that keeps moving without losing itself. It asks for no more than its title says, in the first person. Fluito. I float. I let myself be carried.

— Ovid, 43 BC – 17 AD