When I was about twelve years old somebody told me that if you remember to drink a full glass of water every morning, for about thirty six thousand mornings in a row, you could live to be a hundred. Of course it’s an obvious joke, but even at twelve I understood that it was also a profound joke, maybe the<\/i> profound joke.<\/p>\n
After all, I knew I could count up to thirty thousand, and it wouldn’t take me all that long either. And if I counted every number as a day of my life, by the time I got to thirty thousand I would most likely have run out my own life in numbers. Even at twelve I knew that.<\/p>\n
There’s no getting around it – we only have on the order of thirty thousand days or so to live our entire lives. Not a million or a billion, or some comfortably huge number that doesn’t bear thinking about. No, just around thirty times a hundred – not all that many glasses of water at all.<\/p>\n
There are two ways to look at this potentially alarming fact. One way is to bemoan the tragedy of it all – to curse the clock upon the wall for its incessant tick-tick-ticking, or to run around the house throwing out all the calendars, with their far too brief inventory of days.<\/p>\n
The other way is to think of each day as a rather generous portion of life, a large enough chunk of the total that it would be a shame to waste it. From the moment you rise in the morning until the moment you drift off to sleep that same evening, you are actually engaged in a rather profound act, whether or not you choose to notice. You are living out about one thirty thousandth of your entire life, a fairly significant slice of the pie – the only occasion when you will ever have that particular slice to work with.<\/p>\n
On my better days I remember this. On those days I think of that glass of water I was told about at the age of twelve, and I make sure to drink it all down. I figure I might as well savor that water to the fullest, all cool and refreshing and new. On those days I drink in life to the fullest – every last sip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was about twelve years old somebody told me that if you remember to drink a full glass of water every morning, for about thirty six thousand mornings in a row, you could live to be a hundred. Of course it’s an obvious joke, but even at twelve I understood that it was also … Continue reading “A glass of water”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1655"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1655"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1656,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1655\/revisions\/1656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}