When life is changing course and uncertainty is awake, the writings of Heraclitus, circa 400-500BC, fit the bill. He is one of the most famous and earliest philosophers of the Western tradition. His reflections focus on how from moment to moment all is flux. Life is a river. At times meandering. Rapid. Calm. Devastating. Always moving. Heraclitus would have been the sort of friend who says: go with the flow. Mind you, he himself went against the current, renouncing his family wealth to pursue life in the mountains.

The idea of flow and uncertainty espoused by Heraclitus is linked to how meaning is tied context. One person may see a shape on a step as a swimmer. Another an island. What we see is influenced by what we have seen before and how we choose to attend to that particular moment. In this way we are both shaping the world and it is shaping us, each and every second. This is why to Heraclitus we are in a state of constant becoming, an idea that went viral when the existentialists got hold of it two thousand years later in the 20th Century.