Echoes of the Mind

To Finnan and Cormac

This is a short history of everything I wanted to tell you and would have if I had the time and opportunity. I have already enjoyed the delight of starting the conversation with each of you, but the truth is, these thoughts can be more complete by writing them. And you can revisit them if you choose. They were and are really stories, and I wish more of them were about what we will have shared over the next twenty years. But now is now, and that is where we are at the moment. To end this phase of our conversation in your young lives and to foreshadow our future discussions, I suggest that what you can profitably watch for is the complicated lesson that cooperation is the successful long term strategy in the competition of life.