The Thing About Houses and Something Heraclitus Said

The thing about houses is that they’re never fixed. The second you fill one crack in the wall, you notice another. While you’re rolling up your sleeves to take that on, a pipe clogs in the bathroom. You make a mental note to call the plumber, and then trip over a loose tile on the floor. Each time you mend a crack, fix a pipe, or replace a broken tile, something else comes up—a wobbly chair, a fading plant, a faulty socket. It’s a house, sure, but something about it is always shifting. Your dream house is, ironically, a fixer-upper that’s taking its own time to become your dream house, isn’t it? Let that thought thaw for a moment, while I tell you what Heraclitus had to say about things like this.

Heraclitus was a Greek philosopher from Ephesus who lived around 535–475 BCE. Known as the “Weeping Philosopher” and sometimes as “The Obscure” for his complex ideas, he’s most famous for his doctrine of constant change, or flux. Heraclitus believed that everything in the universe is in a state of perpetual transformation, that opposites coexist in balanced tension. This idea of eternal flux has influenced thinkers across many fields for centuries.

I first met Heraclitus in Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, and I won’t lie—this is the kind of stuff that turns a conversation over coffee into an existential deep dive real quick.

Heraclitus’s concept of “becoming” is famously encapsulated in his line, often translated as:

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

Heraclitus of Ephesus

His philosophy is often summed up as saying that all things are in a process of “becoming,” where things simultaneously “are” and “are not” because of their transient nature. Sounds like your dream house yet?

The idea is unnerving at first, isn’t it? Who in their right mind would want to dwell on the idea that “being” is actually just “becoming,” meaning you’re never quite who you are? But then again, who are you?

Heraclitus would tell you: you are who you are, for now. You’re beyond the shape of who you once were, and not yet formed into who you’ll be tomorrow. So, perhaps it’s more freeing than frightening to think that you’re like stardust scattered across a liminal space.

Yes, we often feel obligated to carry the phantom weight of our past selves into the veiled mystery of the future. But who are we in this single moment, as we traverse?

Maybe you’re not sure how you ended up in this “dream house.” Maybe you worked yourself to the bone for it, maybe it was passed down to you, maybe you stumbled onto it by chance. Or maybe you’re already planning to move out when the timing’s right. But while you’re here, your fixer-upper will ask you to make a few repairs along the way. It may never look like the house you envision, or like the house next door. But every day, it’s a little newer, a little more itself. 

So maybe the truest comfort lies in knowing you’re doing your best to lend a hand in its becoming, and in yours, too. After all, the thing about houses is that they’re never fixed.