Nothing remains the same because nothing is impermeable. Mankind is predisposed to change. People are continuously and constantly modifying their thoughts and behaviors. The experiences encountered by an individual will modify the way he thinks, which effects how he behaves essentially changing who that individual is altogether making it impossible for him to return who he once was.
One's knowledge manipulates one's thinking. One learns all that is essential through experiences. The morals, ideals and values that one believes in are direct products of the circumstances he has endured. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said, "Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." One changes accordingly after learning and understanding a new idea. The newfound notion permanently alters the person's thoughts.
People seldom know who they truly are. How someone thinks affects not only how he perceives his surroundings but also how they behave. “I can't go back to yesterday- because I was a different person then", wrote Lewis Carroll. Carroll expressed that returning to the past cannot be done. It is not because science does not allow people to return to a moment in the past but because having lived through new situations, one has become entirely different; someone whose perceptions have changed. Moments vanish once lived. Once an individual has changed he may never return to what once was familiar to him, to what once was a place where he belonged, to what once was his home.
Once someone has changed, by no means can he retreat to where he once was in life. Physically one can return a place but the people there and the place itself will have changed. One cannot go back to where he was simply because that place no longer exists. In his novel, You Can't Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe wrote, "You can't go back home to your family…back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory". Home is a familiar have, a location where one feels safe. One will leave in search of education, love, money, power; of something greater than one received at home. As time passes, people attempt to revert back home. They long to return to that idealized state. However when someone leaves his home, it will no longer be his home for memory and time have turned a past reality into a present illusion. One cannot return living in the narrow confines of his former self and ignorance.
Leaving home is a step each person must one day take but that step cannot be retracted. Once someone goes off into the world and learns new ideas, he becomes a new person: someone who will find only failure if they attempt to relive old memories. After experiencing warmth, how can the experience of cold remain the same? After being shown the light, how can one be expected to return to darkness? After living life freely, how can one survive in constraints?