People Aren’t Homes: The Transience of Human Connection

People Aren’t Homes: The Transience of Human Connection

We often speak of people as if they are places. We call someone our “safe harbor,” our “sanctuary,” our “home.” These metaphors reveal something essential about our longing: we crave permanence. We want someone to remain steady when everything else shifts, someone we can return to and find unchanged. But people are not houses. They are rivers. They move, they shift, they carve new paths through the landscapes of their lives. They carry away the gifts we leave with them—the laughter, the secrets, the shared silences—and they scatter them downstream, transformed beyond our recognition.

No matter how deeply we love someone, no matter how tightly we hold them, no matter how faithfully we try to hold them close, they will change. They cannot help it. Life insists on motion. Memories fade. Desires evolve. Wounds heal or deepen. And sometimes, without warning, people leave.

I think back to my best friend in college. We spent entire afternoons sprawled across his balcony with a single pair of earphones between us, scribbling bad poetry in notebooks and whispering promises that we’d always be close. We even joked about being neighbors when we were older.

But then came new cities, new partners, new dreams. The daily phone calls dwindled to occasional messages, and now our exchanges are little more than holiday greetings. When I look at old photos of us—faces painted at some forgotten festival—I realize those moments still live, but only in memory. He is no longer that confidant with the earphones, and I am no longer the one who believed forever could be spoken into being.

At first, this truth feels cruel. If no one can be our home, then where do we belong? If every bond is vulnerable to time’s current, how do we find safety in a world that is always moving? And yet, this is not despairing. Because in the river’s motion, there is also arrival. Just as some drift away, others appear. New friends emerge at unexpected bends in the current. A kind stranger, a mentor, a child who looks at you with unfiltered trust—all of them arrive, flowing alongside you for a time. Their presence does not erase the ones who came before, but it reminds you that the river is endless in its capacity to surprise.

Perhaps the cruelty lies only in our expectation, not in the nature of life itself. We forget that we, too, are rivers. Our own bodies are constantly renewing, our desires shifting, our hearts quietly rewriting themselves. Why should we expect others to remain fixed when we ourselves are always changing? To demand permanence from another person is to ask them to step outside of life itself.

And yet, impermanence does not mean meaninglessness. Quite the opposite. Because people are rivers, no meeting is ever the same. Every conversation, every shared breath is unrepeatable. We cannot step into the same river twice, nor can we meet the same person twice—even if they are standing right in front of us. 

This fragility is not a flaw but a gift. It renders each encounter luminous, precious in its fleetingness.

I think of a friend I once knew, the kind that makes you feel both limitless and small. We used to sit on the sea shore, counting satellites as though they were falling stars, whispering promises into the dark. Long strolls and deep discussions! At the time, it felt eternal. Years later, the calls stopped, the texts slowed, and the person who once filled my world became just a familiar name in my contacts. The sea shore is still there. The sky is still endless. But the current carried us elsewhere.

And yet, the river also brings arrivals. Just as some drift away, others appear—unexpected companions in the flow. I remember a stranger on a long train ride, who told me about losing his dear one as the fields blurred past the window. I think of a colleague who turned into an unlikely confidant, the one I laughed with until tears spilled at an office party. These moments were brief, some lasting only hours, others a handful of years. But they, too, were part of the river’s gift—encounters that could never be replicated, yet left something lasting in their wake.

Maybe the question is not Who is my home? but Who is flowing with me now? Instead of searching for a shelter built of permanence, we might learn to find comfort in the current itself—in the presence of another soul moving alongside ours, even if only for part of the journey.

To live this way requires courage: the courage to love without clinging, to cherish without claiming, to release without resentment. But when we do, connection becomes no less meaningful for being transient. In fact, it becomes more so. The river teaches us that beauty does not need to last forever to matter.

People are not homes. They are not shelters we can return to unchanged. They are living waters—ever-moving, ever-becoming. And we, too, are rivers. We meet, we mingle, we part. And in those meetings—however brief, however fragile—we discover the wonder of being alive together, if only for a while.