A Lifetime Reduced to Numbers

How vast....

72 years.

26,280 days.

630,720 hours.

37,843,200 minutes.

2,270,592,000 seconds.

A lifetime, reduced to numbers. But numbers mean nothing when they slip through your fingers.

A third of those years will be spent asleep.

Another third will be given away to work.

What remains? A fleeting fraction—for love, for adventure, for the moments that make life worth living.

And yet, most people won’t realise how little time they have until something shakes them—an illness, a loss, an irreversible moment.

That’s when the words come:

“I wish I had known this sooner.”

“I wish I had spent more time with the people I love.”

“I wish I had lived differently.”

“I wish”

Some might consider themselves lucky if this realisation comes early in life—if they are given the gift of perspective before time has slipped too far away. But this awakening often comes at a cost. A profound loss, a heartbreak, or a moment so life-altering that it shatters the illusion of invincibility. It is a painful trade: clarity in exchange for something that can never be undone.

Every great thinker, from the ancient philosophers to modern scientists, artists, and poets, has been trying to tell us the same thing: Time is the most precious thing we have.

Marcus Aurelius wrote about it in his meditations.

Seneca warned us, “We are not given a short life, but we make it short.”

Einstein sought to bend it.

Van Gogh painted it in sunsets and starry nights.

Shakespeare captured it in sonnets and soliloquies.

Art, music, literature, and science? They are all attempts to grasp something eternal, something that transcends time.

Why do we create?

Why do we write?

Why do we build?

Because we know, deep down, that time is slipping through our fingers. And we want to leave something behind.

Yet, despite all these warnings, we act as if we have forever.

We chase goals that mean nothing.

We collect things instead of memories.

We waste hours on distractions, believing that life is something waiting for us in the future, rather than something happening now.

We trade presence for productivity.

Love for ambition.

Time for things that will not matter when it runs out.

But when we reach the end, we do not ask for more money, more status, more hours at the office.

We ask for more time—with those we love, with the sunsets we never stopped to watch, with the moments we were too busy to cherish.

And then, there’s Murphy’s Law—the idea that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Life rarely unfolds the way we plan. We tell ourselves there will always be more time, that tomorrow is guaranteed, that the people we love will always be there. But time has a way of proving us wrong.

The plans we postpone never happen.

The words we meant to say go unspoken.

The people we thought we’d have forever slip away.

Murphy’s Law reminds us that certainty is an illusion. The future we count on can change in an instant. And that’s exactly why we must stop waiting—stop waiting to live, to love, to be present. Because one day, time will remind us that we waited too long.

Because in the end, love is the only thing that transcends time.

It is the only thing we leave behind.

Love creates.

It heals.

It remembers.

Love does not come without pain, but Love is the closest thing we have to immortality.

“Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends time and space.”

And yet, in a world obsessed with what is temporary, we have forgotten what is eternal.

#spacementalhealth #lifeinperspective #timeandlove