Why not retire? If you retire now, you can go out on top, and get to the much more interesting work of doing something new.

As if this thought wasn’t enough, What Is Time? made me stop and question how I relate to my sense of continuity and consistency:

Contrary to our everyday intuition, there isn’t an entity persisting through time in the form of a static “self.” All our conscious experiences are being generated anew by dynamic neuronal activity. Like an ocean wave, your “self” is an endlessly fluctuating process. Memories trail along from the past, and those memories impact your experience in this moment, but each moment of your experience still depends on the exact state of your brain at that particular point in time.

We’re always residing in the here and now, yet each moment is instantaneously swept away by a ghostly breeze. There it goes. How long did it last? The more focused our attention is on our experience through time, the faster the moments rush by. A raging river. Yet, a vast, peaceful stillness rides along the never-ending stream. We are eternally racing toward the future—yet not moving at all. There’s no traveling forward when you are the river.

In other words, you aren’t physically the same as you were yesterday or who you were a minute ago. Why act like you are?

“Buddhists observe that we’re all on fire. It’s so beautiful to sometimes tune in and see the flickering.”

Graham Duncan in Tribe of Mentors

🗒 The title and the first part of this post came from one of my Wake Up reminders (aka ”Moments”). I couldn’t stop thinking about it.