There are no final thoughts. I quote all the time these wonderful words of Kenneth Burke: “Life is a conversation. When we enter it’s already going on. We try to catch the drift of it. We exit before it’s over.”
The first lesson any pragmatist learns is that at the hour of our death we’re rewriting our biography for the last time. And then the first hour into our death, someone else rewrites the biography for us: our children, our spouses, our friends. “Do you remember what he was like? What he said? What he did?”
So in that sense life is a conversation that continuously goes on. It continuously renews itself, and therefore renews you. Our work is a matter of self-renewal, which is a renewal of the other. No one has the last word. There are no final thoughts. There is no end to the conversation.
-Jim Carey
