Although life is about the accumulation of losses, yet…
Although life is about the accumulation of losses, yet it remains exhilarating. This is a better understanding not just of the inevitability of the tragic in life, but also that loss is not simply an experience to be surmounted but rather an event to live.
— from The Instruments (Awareness/Perception/Expectations) · Out of Time, The Pleasures & Perils of Ageing
In the book
And calibrating all of it is the logbook of experience — the record that lets an old pilot read weather a young one cannot even see. Every flight you truly learn from sharpens the other three instruments; even your losses pay into it, for life is in one sense the steady accumulation of losses and yet remains exhilarating, precisely because each one teaches the eye something it could not have learned any gentler way. But understand who keeps this logbook, because you are really two people at once: an experiencing self who lives each moment as it happens, and a remembering self who files the report afterward and decides what the moment meant. — The Instruments (Awareness/Perception/Expectations)