Over the years, particularly as those years remaining to me irreversibly slip away, I have come to understand the equation T=L, Time equals Life. Compared to Einstein’s famous relationship between energy and the speed of light, E=MC2, my modest equation seems mundane, yet it is much more relevant.
With this simple identity, I mean that there is only so much time in one’s life, about 80 years for the average American. That seems like a lot when one is young, with the likelihood of many years ahead; death is at most an abstract concept that comes to mind only when attending funerals of older relatives. As the decades march on, however, there comes a realization to most people that our days are indeed numbered. Nevertheless, we generally tend to ignore that reality as long as possible.
Equating time and life emphasizes the importance of each day, each hour. To use a term from economics, life is a zero-sum entity, a fixed quantity that cannot be reused once gone. If a person allocates an amount of time to something, it cannot be spent on something else (despite the delusion of multi-tasking, which will be the subject of another post).
Instead of weighing how much time I want to give to some endeavor, I think of how much LIFE I want to give to it. I see one of my neighbors washing his car at least every week or two, and I wonder if he considers that simple equation. I have owned my old Toyota pickup for eleven years and have yet to wash it because I believe I have better things to do with my life.
There is a common idea that one never hears people on on their deathbed saying that they wish they had spent more time at work. That brings up an interesting point of two common verbs we use to describe how we mete out our hours and days: we spend time or we kill time. Using my equation, those phrases take on a different meaning: we spend our life or we kill our life. A better question might be how to invest one’s life.
Thoreau eloquently captured the importance of the relationship between time and life: “How can we kill time without injuring eternity?”
Then there is the closing couplet from Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day”:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
While I like the general sentiment of those lines, I think the poet misses the point. Here is my take:
Tell me, what is it you are doing
with your one wild and precious life?
Indeed, Time equals Life, so hurry because there is not a moment to be lost!
I’ve been thinking about this post since I first read it last weekend, and I have come back to it because more than once I have thought to myself in these past few days: “how much life should I give this?” I find it useful as it helps me determine true value. Gracias, Tom.