Matthew Gates 4m 890 #lifetime
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Time Is A Precious Limit On Life
From the moment you are born, you are dying, as your life is a linear design in terms of aging. Every second is a second closer to death. Every minute is a minute closer to death. Every day is a day closer to death. Every month is a month closer to death. Every year is a year closer to death. Most of us take life for granted, reading about plenty of deaths in the newspaper or seeing it on the news each day, and even dealing with it personally in our own lives, with our friends and loved ones.
There are also many unreported deaths that we never hear about. The amount of people that die each day is upwards of 150,000 to 200,000 people per day, from natural causes, murder, accidents, nature and environmental effects, or bad health. In a lifetime, that adds up to about 4 billion people that have been born and died during your lifetime, that is, if you live to about 75 years of age.
While we can not really know how we will die, there are certainly some measures we can put in place to ensure that our lives are prolonged, including eating healthier, exercising, and avoiding getting ourselves into and being in bad situations. There are, of course, some unfortunate people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time or even the right place at the wrong time, and were killed in some fashion. Their lives were cut short and they were not given the chance to live a full life.
There are many others, however, that have the opportunity to live full lives, meet the love of their life, get married, have children, raise and watch their children grow, and even get to see their children have children, and sometimes, for what is rare to most of us, they get to see their grandchildren have children. Death is inevitable and a part of life. We all must accept it, for it does not care who we are, how old we are, how much money we have, what we have or still have to accomplish, or what we are or were doing. There is no bargaining with death, for when death comes, it will take you without any signs of mercy.
When we put life into perspective, in the eyes of the universe, which stands between 13 to 15 billion (13,000,000,000 to 15,000,000,000) years, our 70 to 100 years of “long life” is really not long at all. For some people, it is long enough, but for others, it could be much longer. We are, but a blink of an eye to the age of the universe.
In comparison, if we take all the insects on Earth, and there are trillions of them on the planet, the equivalent is that one of those insects is you, living your life, which lasts about a day, maybe a week if you are lucky, and then you die. You never knew that ant even existed. It existed for just a brief moment in time, and then it was gone. Human life is the exact same way and has been since the beginning of our time.
When we take the amount of time we get in life, taking 75 years as the average number that most people will live, we all get about 75 summers, 75 winters, 75 falls, and 75 winters. That means, if you are 20 years old, you have about 55 seasons of your life left. If you are 30 years old, you have about 45 seasons left. If you are 40 years old, you have about 35 seasons left. If you are 50 years old, you have about 25 seasons of your life left. And so on and so forth until you become nonexistent on this Earth. All living things are on a countdown clock timer that is invisible and never stops.
Breaking those 75 years down even more into our everyday time measurements:
- .75 centuries
- 7.5 decades
- 900 months
- 3,913.31 weeks
- 27,393.2 days
- 657,436 hours
- 39,445,920 minutes
- 2,365,200,000 seconds
How much time do you have and what will you do with this remaining time?
I use the term nonexistent because really, the only people that will know or knew you ever existed are your loved ones, those closest to you, who will be gone in a few generations, and although your bloodline may be passed down, unless someone kept a record, no one will remember who you were. Sounds quite depressing, doesn’t it? This is just a part of life, death, and the universal existence.
If you have invented something or changed the world in some way, than you may just become a legend in your own right, getting yourself into history books, or on monuments, and known as doing something important. To the people living, they will know your name, know what you did, they won’t really know who you were, but they will know what it is you did for human civilization. Many celebrities have become legends in their own right.
It is what we should all strive for: To accomplish something for human civilization that we will be known for, and in this way, it is a form of living for all eternity, until the end of humanity; to become a legend.
You may only get one life, but you should seek to leave your human footprint in a positive way and enjoy life and the years you get to live it.
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