Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear.
Interpretation
Routine can make time seem to fly by, while new experiences enrich our lives.
This quote emphasizes the difference between a monotonous existence and one filled with novelty and new experiences. It suggests that while maintaining a healthy lifestyle is important for longevity, the richness of life comes from engaging in varied experiences that make time feel meaningful and memorable. Without novelty, days can merge into one another, leading to a life that feels short despite its actual length.
In practice
During a motivational speech about living life to the fullest.
We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.
Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.
If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.
There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.
To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.
I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.
Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.
She was doing it because she had nothing to lose, because her life was one of constant, day to day frustration.
Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.
Your ups and downs in sports, I think they are as normal as daily life: One day you wake up and feel great, the next day you wake up and feel maybe less great.
How shall I sum up my life?_x000D_ I think I’ve been particularly lucky.
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