Is Siddhartha's interactions with Vasuveda at all like my own life?

In the book Siddhartha, the main character, Siddhartha, goes on a journey to find inner peace, and he finally attains it by talking to the ferryman Vasuveda. However, the teachings that Siddhartha had learned do not really reflect at all what I learned about the same topic. Siddhartha learns from Vasuveda and, strangely enough, the river also, that the concept of time is distorted. In their interaction, Siddhartha says "Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?" (106). What Siddhartha means by this is that the present time is everything, including the future and the past. In other words, a stone is a rock, sand, soil, a tree, and eventually, a fruit, all at once, even though we only see it as a stone. However, I have learned differently. In my experience, it is possible to be something other than what you were, or are going to be. I have made plenty of mistakes in my life, but my past doesn't define me, as Siddhartha was led to believe. I am who I am now, not who I was in the past. What this means is that, instead of me being the accumulation of my past, my present, and my future, I am only who I am at the present moment, and whatever I have done in the past, and whatever I do in the future, can't affect how people see me right now.