Time passing

I can’t seem to make up my mind whether life is long or short. If I base it on how quickly my boy and nephews and nieces had grown up, or at how many years I’ve been out of my parents’ control, life seems to be passing so fast. But when I look around me at the evidence of the day-to-day things I’ve done, life seems long. Just looking at the coffee jars I’ve saved the past two years makes life look like practically forever. On average, a moderate coffee drinker like me only consumes two to three tablespoons of powdered coffee a day. Thus, my collection of coffee jars sure represents a lot of days.

I use empty coffee jars as a tool to determine certain statistics of my life. But, I know, many people don’t see them as I do. In fact, I surely seem like an oddball to friends whom I have told about my collection.

If you’re a coffee drinker, let me tell you this: A collection of empty coffee jars can help give you a feeling of longevity. And if only anybody can keep track of such other little things as his own coffee consumption, no one really needs to learn complex mathematical equations or to have a very powerful computer to compute the averages of his days and be able to figure out his own life statistics.

It’s always interesting, for instance, to remember how many times you’ve been hospitalized. Or think about your very first tooth extraction. If you’re about 40 years old, you’ve probably been admitted to a hospital several times, and may have already lost a few of your teeth. It may be difficult for you now to recall exactly how you felt at each occasion.

I cannot exactly recall how many times I’ve so far traveled to the other provinces in the Visayas, and can’t figure out, either, the total expenditures all those trips may have had cost me. Modest estimate: If I travel within the region four times every year and spend 3,000 pesos on each trip, that makes 12,000 pesos a year.

Given that, by now I must have already spent no less than half a million pesos on short out-of-town trips. I can’t believe I’ve had all that money!

It’s more difficult to imagine the total number of kilometers you’ve walked. Or the total volume of toothpaste or shampoo you’ve used. Or how many haircuts you’ve had.

How many times had you spotted a total stranger and instantly thought he or she might make a good life mate for you? How many times had you thought of or written a New Year’s resolution? And how had all those big plans to improve an aspect of yourself or your life turned out?

How long would your hair be if you’d never cut it? Every one of us, I’m sure, has wondered about that at some time. I’ve read somewhere that hair grows roughly about an inch every month. That’s about a foot a year. Does hair stops growing once it gets to be a few feet long? There’s probably no one in the world with hair 30 to 40 feet long, unless perhaps the fellow is purposely growing it for the Guinness Records.

This is the kind of thinking that helps make life seem longer to me. When I think of how many times I’ve cleaned my ears or brushed my teeth, life seems to stretch back, to a very long way back. Thinking about the petty details of living, which many people often find boring, tends to lengthen our perception of time.

It boggles my mind to think of how many kilos of food I’ve consumed in the past five years alone. The number would certainly be incredible. And, how many gallons of ice cream, for instance, would one person have eaten by the end of his lifetime?

It makes life seem long and lovely just thinking about every bite of it. And, indeed, we must savor our every bite of life. The time of our lives is passing, every second of every minute. But we must never let life just pass us by.

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