Measuring Our Lives, Time and Time Again

I once got a warning for speeding on my way to a time management class. Really. I’m sure glad the officer didn’t ask why I was in such a hurry.

Time is an amazing property of our universe. We define it by its measurement such as simply looking at a clock. But it’s how we use and measure time that makes it so important. It is a commodity that, once consumed, is not retrievable. If you decide to not attend a meeting, you can’t attend it after it has occurred. That time is now past.

Humans are not very good at putting time into perspective. We complain that we never have enough time to get things done and yet we can’t wait for winter to be over. The concept of time to kids is quite different than that for adults. They can’t wait for Christmas, summer, or birthdays. The elderly often lament the slow passage of time as they go about their days. I remember announcing to my wife Catherine’s grandmother years ago as I drove her home that I was taking a shortcut that would save time. She said she was in no hurry – time was all she had.

We are obsessed by time. We record TV shows to watch them later when we “have time.” We set alarm clocks and timers on lights. We measure our efficiency by how long it took us to accomplish something. We know that watching a clock at work makes the day go slower. But “time flies when you’re having fun.”

We measure each day in hours and minutes but on a larger scale, a calendar reminds us what month we are in and what season. Our computers and smart phones can easily tell us what time the sun and moon rise and set and even that rain will arrive in 10 minutes. We try to cheat time by changing our clocks twice a year so we can steal a little more sunshine. And we now have clocks that set themselves automatically over the air based on a clock more precise than the Earth’s rotation.

On an even larger scale, we measure life in years and generations that include milestones associated with specific ages or age ranges. I often wondered how I could measure that in my life so I came up with the following exercise that takes just a bit of layout and some recall.

Find a long piece of paper or tape three sheets of standard paper together horizontally so you have at least 25 inches to work with. In this exercise you will assume that you will live to be 100. So, mark and number quarter-inch increments from 0-100. You can go with a shorter lifespan but let’s try to be optimistic.

Now write down your significant life events below the age you were at the time. For example, everyone would put “born” at year 0. You can do a range for elementary school such as years 5-11. Complete the other school years, post-high school education, military service, jobs, marriage, kids’ births and any other significant life-changing milestones you had. Don’t include minor events, like that trip to Disney World. And make sure they are just your own significant accomplishments, not those of your family.

If you complete this as suggested you might be as startled as I was when I noticed that there was a very long period of time that consisted of just going to work. Yes, there are many events in your life during that time, even job changes and moves. But if your results are anything like mine, there will be a lot of blank space anywhere from about age 30 until your retirement age.

Is that bad and depressing? No. It just shows us that we assign a lot of importance to our accomplishments early in life and that, by comparison, our commitment to raising a family and working to build a retirement might seem boring.

Early in my adult life I joked about retiring by the time I was 40. I was going to invent something cool. Then it became 50. In 1996, Catherine and the kids gave me a Hallmark retirement countdown clock for Father’s Day. I set it for the day I would turn 59 1/2 which is when I would be able to start tapping into my 401K – only 6,579 days to go! I had to replace the battery in it a couple times to make it to my actual retirement age of 62.

A lifespan of 100 years might seem like a long time but we were star dust long before we were born and will be star dust again for much longer than that. Human existence is very short in the history of everything. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. If that timeframe is viewed as one day, humans have been around for just the last second of that 24 hours.

Astrophysicists measure time in the extreme. They have determined that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old and yet when they describe in detail the events during the first second of the Big Bang, they need to break it down into units called Planck time, which are each one billionth billionth billionth billionth billionth of a second. Now, that’s a very short time. Apparently, it was a very busy first second and worth dividing up that much.

I’m well beyond the halfway point of my life, even if I do live to be 100. But in my remaining time, I have a lot of things I want to do before I’m space dust again. Time’s a wastin’.