How Much Time?

How much time do I have? I'm in good health, and come from a long-lived family; I could easily be alive and well until I'm 80 or more. That's not a lot of years, at least in absolute terms, but that doesn't bother me, because a year is a long time.

A day, on the other hand, is a short time. On a good day, when I'm inspired, I can look back at the end of it and be surprised at how much I've done, but most days I don't really accomplish very much. Still, that doesn't bother me, because I have a lot of days.

At some point, though, I discovered the unhappy medium: if I measure my time in months, I can grasp both the size and the number. The number is about a thousand, which is a lot, but not incomprehensibly many, and the size is defined by how much I can do. (In a normal month, for example, I can produce a solid batch of essays.) And, that does bother me … it makes me sad, and makes me understand that there's not enough time.