How much do you have left to live?
When I was younger, I wondered if old people ever felt like they have lived too much. Whether they worried they fretted about the fact that they had a small amount of time left on this planet. I think they probably do.
I turned 35 this month and for some reason, it felt like I had crossed 50% of my life already. When I look back on that journey I feel I have lived so many memories already, yet at the moment it still feels like there’s so much yet to experience, and that 50% of bygone time feels like it passed too fast.
I have been mulling this thought over for some time now. Whether we as human beings can quantify time or is time mostly a qualitative experience we have. I would lean more toward the latter. Allow me to elaborate.
Have you felt like certain moments (say holding a plank) seem to make you feel every single second while others say for example while scrolling through your phone time seems to pass by so fast? It’s so hard to quantify each of those temporal experiences yet qualitatively speaking the experience of each of those moments feels so different.
My understanding of time now is that it changes its nature based on how alive you feel in that moment.
So with that understanding here’s a pathway for life that I am working towards. I would like to maximize the amount of time I feel alive. What does this mean practically? It means I would like to spend the most amount of time doing work, spending time with, or engaging my brain in activities that have my emotions connected to it. I think that’s how we human beings feel alive. The more emotionally present you are the more alive you feel.
I am mindful of the fact that each one of us has things to get through that feel like drudgery. Say certain aspects of our work that are mindless, the everyday commute, the meeting with people out of obligation but then there are so many other things we willingly spend time on that fall into the drudgery category yet we inflict it upon ourselves
These activities would include things like spending time on social media, engaging or arguing on opinions that we don’t really care about, keeping people, relationships, and activities in our life that we don’t really care about, and vice versa.
In the years to come, I wish to minimize the latter category to ensure I live as fully as I could.
When I think about the moment I will die, whether it’s tomorrow or 35 years from now, who knows when it’s at; I would like to pass feeling that I lived in the time that I was given and not have regrets about wasting time on frivolities that I don’t quite care about.
