The Psalms and a Spreadsheet. Working to a deadline

One of my favorite passages of scripture is Psalms 90. There’s a lot to learn there, regardless of your faith background. In it, Moses discusses time from God’s perspective.

⁴ For a thousand years in Your sight
Are like yesterday when it passes by,
Or as a watch in the night…

¹⁰ As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years,
Or if due to strength, eighty years,
Yet their pride is but labor and sorrow;
For soon it is gone and we fly away.

Time ticks away for us but in the grand scheme it’s a tick of the clock or a passing night. In fact, according to Biomimicry.net if we compressed the age of the earth to a calendar year, humans appear on December 31 @ 11:36 pm.

And comparing the years of a life to Universal time is even more humbling. 70 or 80 years out of 13.8 billion. 0.00000054%.

But I digress.  The key message is in verse 12.

So teach us to number our days,
That we may gain a heart of wisdom.

It’s good to remember that we are all working to a deadline. Whether it’s close of business Friday or the end of a life, we don’t have forever. By recognizing and numbering our days (and hours and minute) we can appreciate how limited our time is and spend those weeks days hours minutes doing what matters most, so that when we look back on a life we have something we can take pride in.  

And I promised a spreadsheet, so here it is. I’ve mentioned before that I love a good visualization. I heard about this starting with an interview with Tim Urban, then his Ted Talk, Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator and finally his blog, Wait but Why.

This is his 90-year life in weeks. I added a few milestones of my own in gold. Moving overseas, first job, wedding, kids. Dark blue is the time that’s past. The grey at the end is unknown. Maybe I don’t make it to 90. Maybe I end up with a physical or mental ailment and I don’t have the quality or ability to contribute at the end. I don’t know. Nobody does.

The red stripe represents the almost full year this blog has been stirring around in my mind. After all this it’s not a big deal, but it’s been consuming my thoughts and floating around in my head as an “undone” all this time.

The (shrinking) light blue is the Future. There’s a lot of it and at the same time not very much.

Unknown. Potential. Possibility. Opportunity.

Oh Shit. At the End, somewhere, is the Dead-line.