“From an everyday standpoint, the fact that life is finite feels like a terrible insult… There you were, planning to live on forever… but now here comes mortality, to steal away the life that was rightfully yours…
Yet, on reflection, there’s something very entitled about this attitude. Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who’d failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given — as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.”
–Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
I’ve been listening to this book on audio and finding it really insightful and good. I invite you to take a tiny “time out” right now to recognize/appreciate/marvel at how miraculous it is that you are here right now–that you’ve been granted four thousand weeks (give or take) to live fully, richly, truly, deeply, well.
Resources:
- Summary article of main points from the book.
- Another article.
- Author’s website.
I’m glad to be a part of this miracle of living with you.
Sending love,
Molly
