“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?” The above quote, from Richard Dawkins, invites thoughtful readers to take a very long-term view of time. It occurs to me that you know you’re getting a little long in the tooth when you describe your life in decades. “I did such and such in the 80s, the 90s were a blur and the noughties were all diapers and Hop on Pop.” A decade feels like a long time. But when you think about time from an evolutionary perspective, a decade is a blink of an eye. As mortal human beings, we have only brief decades on this Earth. How do we make them meaningful? Is there a meaning in life or is there only the meaning that we make? The cranky Old … [Read more...]