Finished reading both “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”, which I started in 2020, over the last 24 hours.

More on “Thinking, Fast and Slow” another day, but a lot of it resonates with me personally… and some good takeaways and applications for work too.

On “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”: 

• Question of whether we live by chance or plan 
• What ties the five people who were on the bridge of San Luis Rey when it broke – were they chosen by fate / destiny / chance to be there at that particular moment and therefore die
• The bulk of book develops back story of the 5 people, who are inter related. 
• As it is, all have suffered from longing, human errors and misunderstandings between them and those they love or those who love them, and they were at potential inflection point, from misery and despair to hope and a a potential new beginning when they died on the bridge 
• As a result of the 5 people’s deaths, there have been new realisations and growth in those they have left behind, some of whom have connected, leaned on each other, and developed new perspectives

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey