I’m 27 now. It’s been 10 years since I was in New Zealand. I was 17, and life seemed endless back then. I was not thinking about time one bit. I was out exploring, discovering, experiencing, learning. I felt like I could live forever.
And all of a sudden, a decade has passed. I’m nearing 30 now.
Ten years sounds like an inconceivably long time, but it has just flashed right before me, hasn’t it? Not so long after all!
Some years ago I read an article on waitbutwhy about visualising the time we have as human beings. “Years” is a rather abstract concept that we might have trouble wrapping our head around, but putting it in terms of months makes it far easier to conceptualise the passage of time.
I still vividly remember that day we first heard about the Coronavirus outbreak. It’s been 1.5 months since already! That’s more than a dot according to this chart:
Seeing this really put it into perspective how fleeting this all is. Our life is ticking away one dot at a time, and one of those dots is frighteningly short. Seriously — remember how it was Tết just now?
Dad’s Dots
My dad had me when he was 30, and he is right above that 60th Birthday point. My entire life, from his perspective, can be summed up in the green region:
There really is nothing we can do to stop the advance of those dots. My dad keeps pestering me about giving him a grandkid, which I haven’t given much serious thought to. But seeing how few dots he has left, I kind of understand it a bit more. But no, I’m not going to have a kid any time soon.
Anyway, to quote the original author:
Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long. But this chart helps to emphasize that it’s most certainly finite. Those are your weeks and they’re all you’ve got.
Some perish a bit sooner along the way, some make it to 100+, but what it all boils down to is a bunch of dots on the calendar of time.