Never Stop Learning New Things. Don't Give Up!
You hit your peak. You reach the goals you set. And then what? My advice is simple: keep going. Learning runs the whole length of a life, right up to the moment you arrive at Heaven's door. Hold onto your motivation and quitting stops being an option. Life keeps opening up the more you understand, and that alone keeps a person from turning dull. I haven't stopped, and I don't plan to.
Plenty of people get to the mountaintop and then start sliding back down the far side toward the end. They look at whatever they accomplished and wonder, is this really it? When the answer that comes back is yes, they stop reaching. They just tread water until the effort of treading wears them out, and down they go.
I don't see death as a finish line. Transition feels like the truer word to me, because I think life carries on in some other form once you get there. It can arrive whenever. For some people it shows up far too soon, for others it drags in late. Either way, I'd rather not fill my head with it.
Staying inside the present moment often works better. Picture someone whose memory has started to slip. A phone call still gives them something. So does reading a card, even if the details of the conversation slide away an hour later. Should the people who love that person stop calling, stop talking, because none of it will stick? I say no. The pleasure of the moment is real while it lasts. Why take that away?
And for that same person, the delight of meeting something new keeps repeating itself, fresh each time. Why rob anyone of that? Why rob yourself of learning, or of catching sight of a familiar thing from an angle you hadn't used before? Clutch the old too tightly and you shut the door on whatever the new had to offer. None of us knows how much is still out there to pick up. Learning keeps the brain young; the research bears that out. Pass the joy of it around and it draws people together, whatever their ages. Nobody needs to be a bore or a stick in the mud. Least of all to themselves.