The Dance of Time by Ken Cutler

When I was a freshman in high school, my earth science teacher once started out a class by playing Pink Floyd’s song Time, from their album The Dark Side of the Moon. He played the uncut version, which runs almost seven minutes. His reasoning for having us listen to the song was that musicians probably know more about time than the typical person. Two years after that science class, a song called Time Passages by Al Stewart became popular. I’m sure readers can think of many other popular songs that include time as a theme.

Time is a fascinating and fundamental concept, but as a whole we don’t comprehend it well. One of my high school math teachers presented a mathematical argument as to why time seems to speed up as we age. The year between birthdays four and five represents a full fifth of your life experience. The year between your 49^th and 50^th birthdays constitutes just two percent of the years you’ve lived. Our perception of time is not static.

Over 20 years ago, I went through a difficult period. For the previous several years, I had been in charge of a stressful project at work. My father was dying. We were building a house. And I probably had a form of PTSD lingering from the recent experience of my young daughter’s cancer ordeal. At some point, something snapped and I experienced a long season of serious insomnia. No treatment seemed to help; in fact, the various medications that were prescribed for me made the problem worse. Unable to sleep more than an hour or so at night for months on end, I slipped into an abyss. A single day seemed agonizingly long in the face of unrelenting misery.

I’ve wrestled with the concept of time throughout my life. As a young man, I memorized this verse from the Psalms: “Show me, O Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life.” It’s a verse I still meditate on, and it takes on different layers of meaning as I age. Still, I don’t know the number of days I have left. As we know all too well here at HumbleDollar, our lifespan expectations can be shattered in a moment.

My father lived to be almost 84, and my mother 91. Based on that, I seem to have a default mental model that tells me to figure on living until about 80. Yet, when I think about it, my parents’ lifespans provide little basis for that assumption. When my dad reached 60, for a brief while he talked as if it were likely he wouldn’t be around much longer. I didn’t understand Dad’s attitude until much later, when I found out his own father had dropped dead at 61. That age must have become a benchmark for him. Fortunately, it was off by 23 years.

I find I have little interest in agonizing over the minutiae of how long of a retirement to plan for. No matter how long one’s life lasts, in the end it will be “fleeting” in comparison to time already passed. And there is also a concept called eternity to consider, which is both mind-blowing and sobering.