What Time is it?
“On average, a person has
700,000 hours in his or her life.” I hadn’t been listening to the speaker for a
while when this sentence caught my attention. I was at a leadership seminar in
Southern Illinois and I wasn’t really learning anything new. I also don’t remember
what the rest of the speaker’s speech was about, but that one sentence stayed
ingrained in my mind. I had never thought about how much time I had to live
before and I didn’t approach this realization with remorse, just with
astonishment. Every hour is 1/700,000 of a person’s life. I had never
calculated how many hours an average person would live and I assumed it was at
least a million. But this finite number made me come to the realization that
each hour is precious for the individual. I didn’t suddenly change my entire
lifestyle or decide never to relax again, but throughout the next month, the thought remained at the back of my
head. Every time I was sitting there with nothing to do the thought would
reappear in the back of my head, urging me to work on something, anything.
What I have also come to
realize is that when adults say that “time flies,” they mean it. Think about
when you were 5 years old. At that point,
one year was only 1/5th of
your life. When you are 60 a year will seem to go by incredibly fast because it’s only 1/60th of your life. The way we perceive time has to do with how long
we have lived on this Earth and also what we are doing in our life. For example,
if you are at school every day with the exact same schedule time might seem to drag
on forever. As you are nearing graduation it might seem like school will never
end. However, whenever adults tell you about their high school years, the
common theme seems to be that they went by too fast and that they miss them.
Have your parents ever
told you not to tell their age to anyone? Why do people care about how old they
are? When they were young they were probably jumping for joy on their birthday
because they were one year older. One-year closer to gaining all the privileges
but also responsibilities of adulthood. Adults however aren’t as excited when
the time comes for their next birthday and are sometimes even embarrassed. I
think that it’s important to value every hour in one’s life. However, I don’t think
we should go about with our lives making sure that we are doing something
important every second of the day. I think that it’s not just about what you do
in life, but how you approach it and if you enjoy the work you do.
I thought this was really interesting, and it is definitely something that I have thought about on occasion before. I have often wondered why time seems to move faster now than it did in the past, and I think you did a good job explaining that.
ReplyDeleteLife isn't forever and this thought really comes back to hit me in the head whenever I think about these fractions of time you mention in your post. Once you are able to quantify things, everything is really put into perspective.
ReplyDeleteThis is was really interesting. I wonder what prompted you to write about this.
I agree with your point that we probably shouldn't constantly be thinking about how much time we have left to live. 700,000 hours is about 80 years, so that'd be 80 years of agonizing hell if we were always worried about time. What about if you live past 80 though? I'd be interested to see what that speaker's advice would be at that point.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I've actually ever thought about this before! This is definitely going to plague me for the next couple of months.
ReplyDeleteThis actually struck me completely by surprise. Like you I didn't ever stop and think about literally how much time we have to spend. I really liked the fact that you included both the facts and how it changed you and your perspective. Honestly, I think my outlook on life is different as well, thank you for sharing this specific experience of yours.
ReplyDeleteI have heard similar figures, but I look at them with a positive light. Assuming that you sleep 10 hours a night, you have approximately 408,000 waking hours. You may have also heard that it supposedly takes 10,000 hours to master a field. That means that you could, theoretically, excel at 40 different things! Obviously it's not that simple, but you get the point.
ReplyDeleteWow thank you for sharing! I’ll continue to use this figure to remind myself to enjoy and make use of every hour.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading your post I kept thinking about how society thought about age before they recorded birthdays and when the majority of the population was too uneducated to "understand" time. Of course there was the comparison of seasons and how many had passed but the actual number was not known. I think dwelling on the amount of time you have left isn't useful and rather you should make the best of what you have in the present, they did that in the past and I think society should return to that.
ReplyDelete