What have you done this week? Don't worry there's always next week.
We think of our lives as endless weeks but if we are lucky enough to live until the age of 90 we only have 4680 weeks on this earth. What’s more, by age 25, 1,300 of these weeks have already passed. While 90 years can be difficult to grasp, a week is quite knowable. And a week can slip by very quickly. It often feels like we have countless weeks ahead of us. It's depressing maths but it’s just a few thousand — a number small enough to fit neatly in a single image.
Author Tim Urban is a comic artist and a natural visual thinker. In considering his time, he drew up a calendar of sorts—a weekly chart of an entire life.
Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long. But this chart helps to emphasize that it’s most certainly finite. Those are your weeks and they’re all you’ve got.
Given that fact, the only appropriate word to describe your weeks is precious. There are trillions upon trillions of weeks in eternity, and those are your tiny handful.
While there may be an initial shock, looking at the time you have left is an opportunity to commit to change. This is not a thought process intended to cause regret about time already passed. Instead, let it be an opening to new, richer paths. It may seem like it’s too late – like our current path is now linear and set out before us. Yet as this diagram reminds us, there are still so many possibilities that lie ahead.
As you think of the weeks you have left have a think about the things you could do now to explore new paths. Which friends could you reconnect with? What plans could you make together?
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