none who go can ever come back again

 I work hard at maintaining & expanding my mind, my comprehension of this wonderful Big Place.  And a few months ago, listening to the podcast "The Fall of Civilizations" by Paul Cooper, here "18. Egypt - Fall of the Pharaohs", I was captivated by the last Hieroglyphic literature quoted & translated.  So here's the relevant transcript extract:

One generation passes, another stays behind. Such has it been since the men of ancient times. The gods of long ago rest in their pyramids, and yet the great and blessed likewise lie buried in their tombs. Yet those who built great mansions, their places are no more. What has become of them all?

I have heard their words retold time and again. But where are their dwellings now? Their walls are in ruins, and their places are no more. Like something... That has never been. There is no return for them to explain their present state of being, to say how it is with them, to gentle our hearts until we make our journey to the place where they have gone.

So follow your heart and your happiness. Conduct your affairs on earth as your heart dictates, for that day of mourning will surely come for you. So spend your days joyfully. And do not grow weary of living. No man takes his things with him, and none who go can ever come back again.

I don't know about you, reader, but to me that's profound.  And further, it's a better statement than I can make concerning the value of a happy life, one as a _choice_ to be happy.  We who sit at the intersection between infinity (whether that's the CMB in opposite directions, and whatever's beyond it, or alternately from the infinitely large & expanding universe downward to the Planck length and beyond) and eternity (topologically we seem to be in an open, hyperbolic universe, where one "day" there will be nothing but photons, a "heat-death" where the last particles will have had no others within a "particle horizon" so no causality possible, every subsequent moment will be the same, nothing will ever change, and so time will become meaningless), we'll never be here again.  This moment, right now, is the best time to be alive, a personal Golden Age for each of us.  And of course where we are can never be other than "here".  So the title and the concept of the book _Be Here Now_, from Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert), seems inevitable.

This morning I awoke to my cat Elvis only inches from my head, sleeping on "his" wool sweater & probably dreaming of breakfast soon.  As the "alborado" sky slowly brighted to a dawn of sun peeking through clouds, I declared a reward, a white-chocolate mocha (with extra sugar) from my fav local drive-up coffee shack.  It doesn't get much better than this.  And you, reading this, how are you appreciating this your glorious day?  It'll never come again....

Janis Joplin

 I'd trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday

Now I understand your pain, Janis, alas half-a-century too late.  You had such talent, but it couldn't survive, couldn't thrive.

For myself there's another, much more recent retelling (in the chapter "Isle of Happiness" from AI 2041 by Chen Qiufan & Kai-Fu Lee) of a much, much more ancient tale (attribution: "The Man Who Never Laughed Again" from The Thousand Nights and a Night):

thou wilt repent, when repentance will avail thee not

Too Soon Too Old, Too Late Too Smart -- indeed.