SATURDAY, 5 JANUARY 2013
I usually stand in the front row of the choir when a lament is being sung about how time flies. One year … five years … a decade! Twenty years … As you’re standing there in shock, wondering what you have done and what you still wanted to do, you see the images of ten and twenty years ago in your mind’s eye – clear as crystal, as if it was yesterday.
It is therefore sometimes necessary to remind yourself of the actual numbers:
5 years: almost 2,000 days and nights
10 years: more than 3,500 days and nights
20 years: more than 7,000 days and nights; more than 7,000 times you ate breakfast, more than 7,000 dinners; more than 20,000 trips to the loo; if you worked full-time for a 20-year period, that means perhaps as much as 5,000 days … more than 5,000 times stuck in traffic (maybe twice as much) … thousands of times you talked to people you really wanted to avoid … maybe more than a thousand barbeques in the backyard … maybe as many as 10,000 programs watched on TV, or even more.
Time doesn’t really fly.
In fact, if you look at it closely, over five or ten or twenty years, you have thousands of opportunities to do good, to fix what is wrong or what you have done wrong, and to produce something or to help create something that will eventually have value to other people.
Every day you get a chance to enjoy a little something of life, and every day you get a chance to mean something to someone else – someone who may remember you long after you have enjoyed the last of more than 25,000 breakfasts.
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