Who doesn’t want to live a long life !
Everyone wishes for as many trips around the sun as possible in their lifetime.
In India, when elders bless younger people, they usually pray for them to have a life lasting aeons.

But what exactly does more years in one’s life add to?
Does more years translate to more meaning?
Does it also not imply a longer old age full of decay and suffering?

I feel that we should reimagine our conception of a lifetime.

How about thinking of age in terms of time and not years.

Let me explain what I mean by this.

Remember Eisntein, the fuzzy haired genius?
Once, one of his students asked him to explain the concept of relativity in simple language.

Here’s what Eisntein said,

‘When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it’s only a minute,
But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s two hours.
That’s relativity.’

Such elegant simplification!
The jest of a genius.

The way we sense our time on this beautiful blue dot is also a function of relativity.
A life full of unwise choices can seem to be an agonisingly long drag.
Just like a macrocosm of a boring lecture in college. An abyss with no apparent end.

On the other hand, a life full of wise choices, purpose and meaning would feel like a breeze.
A macrocosm of an hour with your favourite playmate when you were a toddler.
You never realised when time passed, since you were so involved in enjoying each moment, weren’t you?

But here lies the paradox.

The inherent paradox in our wish is that we want a long and meaningful life.
Because long and meaningful don’t go together.

If you are living a meaningful life, then life would pass so easily that you never realise when the years flew by, just like hours fly by when you’re with someone you love.
Life would seem to have finished in a moment.

But if you feel that life is long, it just means that life is seeming long to you, maybe because for you, it isn’t so much fun to be alive !
For if you truly enjoy something, time would feel to have passed in a jiffy !

It is best to live in terms of time and not years.

Rather than wishing for a long life, we should wish for a life that just passes by, for it would mean that we truly enjoyed each moment in it.

And the best way to get that experience is by being in love,
With life itself.

Clocks and calendars aside,
I wish you a meaningful life.

What else does one need in life after all !