Dear Jessica Brennan,
You’re having a birthday next week, so I thought I would write about time, and life, and numbers.
About ten years ago I used to tell people that my doctor had only given me 2756 weeks to live. They would often look sad until they realized that these 2756 weeks actually took me to age 100. It was a good party gag, but honestly it doesn’t seem as funny now, because I only have 2236 weeks left to live (giving myself the lofty expectation of a life that’s a century long).
For a person who was never good at math, I do enjoy looking at things mathematically, so when I was considering this blog I took to my Excel program to give me a visual representation of time.
I made squares on a spreadsheet that were about the right size to put a check-mark in, and printed a page. The page had 893 squares on it. I then started thinking about what those squares could represent. Such possibilities!
If they represented days left in life, my life would take up 17 pages of check-marks, yours would take up 27 pages, and Dad’s would take up 13 pages.
If they represented weeks, you would have less than 4 pages, I would have two and a half pages and Dad would have less than 2 pages.
And if these little boxes represented months, we are all on the last page of our lives.
This intrigued me, so I asked Professor Google, how long we are all likely to live based on our habits and our family history. The ever-wise and always true internet gave me these results:
Jessica – 88 years
Mum – 87 years
Dad – 85 years – men always get a raw deal for life expectancy it seems.
These results though, changed our pages and numbers a little. You lost 5 pages of your sheets that represented days left, almost a full sheet of weeks, and 144 squares on your month-page. Dad and I had our own diminishing results, and I was starting to see clearly that if this family is on the last page of our lives, we might want to look at things a little differently.
Circumstances we have gone through this year have made all of us see life a little clearer. As a result, I imagine that making a bucket list of 648 things you want to do, and using your 648 month-squares for that could be a fun exercise. I only have 360 month-squares, so I need to get at it, because I have a busy mind and if Dad only has 216 squares, I want a lot of my squares to be the same as his and yours.
This beneficial yet sobering process taught me a few things:
- Time flies whether you’re having fun or not, so you might as well have fun.
- Life doesn’t guarantee you even one more square, but even if you get all the squares you are “entitled” to, you have to fill them with what you want. Expecting the lottery win, listening to the “tomorrow” monologue in your head, the constant hoping that things will improve on their own – that is all just putting check-marks in empty squares.
- Me, you, Dad, we are totally in control of what goes on in those little squares. Money doesn’t control it, life doesn’t. Friends or other people don’t control it. We do.
- Risks, mistakes and wrong moves, don’t actually exist on the last page of life. The only true risk is submitting to fear and doing nothing. The only real mistake is not being your whole true self, and the only wrong move is not going for what it is that you want to fill up those boxes.
I’m going to take this exercise seriously and fill my page with the life I want. I will likely need to fill in Dad’s page too as he will just draw a map to the Waltzing Weasel.
What will you do with the last page of your life?
Gentle readers, what will you do?
Love Mum xo