For years, whenever I visited my ancestral home, the Isle of Lewis, I would collect from the river at Dalmore Beach a few polished stones of Lewisian Gneiss, gradually building my own cairn back in Cayman. I sense (and it was my personal experience) that in our 20s and 30s (and 40s?) we are focussed more on what we can take out of the river, then perhaps by our 50s and beyond we flip that?
“Near the end of his life, I asked (Steve Jobs) about the meaning of all this. He said that he’d learned … that life is like a river. At first, you think that if you’re successful, you get to take many things out of the river, products people have made or ideas they’ve come up with. But he said, “Eventually in life, you realize that it’s not what you get to take out of the river, it’s what you get to put into the river.”
Walter Isaacson on The Knowledge Project podcast by Farnam Street
As I write this, Steve Jobs died at 56. I turned 56 last week. Food for thought before we become food for worms?