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always changing

Three years ago (thanks, Facebook, for reminding me!), I listened to a TED talk by Dan Gilbert entitled "The Psychology of Your Future Self," and even now, the message still resonates with me. It reminds me that with all my faults and mistakes, I am still not done. I am not done trying to make things better, making myself better. There is hope that in the future, as I take my last breath, I can be satisfied and proud of my identity, my work and my legacy.

Dan Gilbert ends with the one of the most powerful ideas I have encountered:
"Most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it hard to imagine who we're going to be, and then we mistakenly think that because it's hard to imagine, it's not likely to happen. Sorry, when people say "I can't imagine that," they're usually talking about their own lack of imagination, and not about the unlikelihood of the event that they're describing.
The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. It's as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. It's a watershed on the timeline. It's the moment at which we finally become ourselves. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our life is change."

Cheers to the future!

Here's the TED talk if you want to watch it.
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