Meditations on Time

Here I am, at age 78, seemingly surrounded by stories about time. These stories naturally have a way of turning my thoughts toward how short my own time may be.

I just reread a novel in which every adult on the planet receives a box containing a string that reveals exactly how long they will live. And I’m recalling the television comedy about a moral accounting system that tracks a person’s life here on Earth. Finally, there’s the recent film that imagines we get to choose the precise form our eternity will take.

I did not set out to braid these snippets of our popular culture together. They braided themselves. At this age, time insists on being the subject.

The reminders are constant. Obituary columns, for one. My personal calendar, for another, which now includes far more medical appointments than it once did. Routine blood work. MRI, CT and DEXA scans. Follow-ups, with each visit carrying the distinct possibility that this will be the one where the doctor pauses too long before speaking. Most of the time the news is ordinary. “See you in six months.” But the suspense never quite disappears.

In Nikki Erlick’s 2022 novel The Measure, a mid-life character suggests that a string long enough to reach age eighty would count as good news. When I read that passage, I felt a small jolt. Eighty no longer feels like a distant horizon. It is a number that is uncomfortably close.

If I opened my box today, I would automatically have a long string. The real question would be: how much longer? A year? Five years? Ten? More? Though If I died today, surely no one would lament that I was gone before my time.

All of which leads to other concerns. How many more years would I want if they are shadowed by increasing pain — or other physical or mental decline? Longevity, at this stage, is not automatically the goal. There are conditions.

The Good Place, the four-season television series originally airing on NBC (and now available on Peacock), begins with a moral scoring system; every human action or interaction earns positive or negative points. An endless array of cosmic accountants supposedly keeps track of these tallies someplace up there in the sky, and when you die your final count decides your destiny. It is morality, and judgment day, rendered as a dispassionate spreadsheet.

At 78, that premise feels less like satire and more like a quiet audit. I find myself reviewing my own ledger. Have I been good? Not necessarily accomplished. Nor productive. But good?

My entries must be mixed. I have lived and loved imperfectly. I have hurt people I did not intend to hurt. There are relationships that did not endure. Some ended gently. Others did not. Even now there is sadness attached to those chapters, a sense that certain conversations might have gone differently if I had been wiser, braver or simply more skilled.

I sometimes wonder whether those endings count against me, or whether they merely show that I kept trying to connect and sometimes failed.

The show ultimately dismantles its point system, though. Life, it suggests, is far too entangled for simple math. Growth matters more than totals; it matters more than being flawless.

What lingers for me now is the series’ ending. Even paradise becomes hollow if it stretches on forever. In the final season, the characters are offered an exit. They step through one last door when they feel complete. Eternity with no ending, the show suggests, flattens meaning.

So, I wonder: How, ultimately, will I measure my existence? Will there ever be a time when will I feel complete?

Those questions followed me into the 2025 film Eternity, now on Apple TV, where humanity is invited to choose the form one’s forever will take. The idea sounds appealing at first. Pick your paradise. A tropical beach, for example. Perfect weather. Endless calm.

But what would that mean after a thousand years? Ten thousand? How could any single scene, no matter how beautiful, sustain significance without limit? Without scarcity?

Part of what makes a late-life conversation more vivid is precisely that it may not be repeated endlessly. Scarcity is what gives weight to life’s ordinary moments.

I look at my shelves, full of the books I will gradually have to dispose of, and I am reminded that even objects, like relationships, have their season. I carry both gratitude and regret. At 78, one does not escape such reckoning.

If I knew the precise length of my string, I suspect I would live differently. I might rush to repair what remains frayed. Or I might grow cautious, conserving energy. Uncertainty leaves me in between. Aware of the limit, but not of its measure.

It is that uncertainty, perhaps, that keeps life from becoming either frantic or complacent.

If there is a ledger somewhere, I hope it records effort. That it shows I kept revising myself. That I tried to mend what I could. That I did not stop growing simply because the horizon drew closer.

I am not eager to open the box. And I am not certain I want a tropical eternity with no horizon. I only know that the ticking is audible now. Doctor visits. Quiet evenings. Books to disperse. Old relationships to ponder.

Age 78. Still adding to the ledger.

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Poetry Selection: The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

-Mary Oliver

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