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In every moment, we are dying.

In every moment, we are changing.

The corporeal body gradually dies to the inexorable current of time, and our identity—who we are in this strange mental construct of ours—is ever changing, ever dissipating into the whirlwind of our circumstances.

Who you are now becomes who you were by the second. It’s easy to realize these changes in the self, especially so if we are mindful enough to realize it without being pried from our complacency, but it is entirely a different challenge to see it in others. And so treat everyone that you know as if they were a stranger; approach your friends, your family, and your coworkers with humility, providing them with the benefit of the doubt— to come to every interaction without the crass assumption that they were the same person you’ve always assumed them to be, and instead with a hopeful vision, to merely desire to learn who someone is, at that very moment despite the fleeting nature of time, and not let every interaction be imbued by who they were.