Counting Down the Days ~ Entering 2023 with Intention

The year 2023 opened on the 12th month on the week’s 7th day upon the strike of the 24th hour. It began as all year’s do, to a sky cold and gray and an earth yearning to burst free in the promise of the fusion between the two – sky and earth. What if time worked this way?

Instead, life orients around a system of time that counts upward because the advance of time is likely endless, and it might feel limiting or incorrect to count down to an arbitrary Zero or a cyclically fixed One. Perhaps, too, strange to begin one’s life at 100 only to find oneself living 15 years beyond Zero and expiring at the ripe old age of “negative fifteen years old” or “twice 85.” Would it terrify us to converge upon Zero?

Counting life down to Zero has all the anxiety-inducing qualities of watching a timed-explosive ticking away. Still, it has all the promise of countless soulful stories one has heard about passions for life being sparked for another upon learning of a terminal illness or of the magic extracted in the dwindling days of a summer romance or the time transcendent quality of a fated last kiss.

One easily forgets the value of toilet paper when the roll is full, but as the roll empties and each full turn yields less squares the value of each piece is more vital. In a world where the supply lines for toilet paper may falter, greater care is taken to use what is left on the roll wisely.

The actuarial table of life could match the turning of one’s paper supply. It is the resource spent wisely and lovingly, until there is no time left to spend it, from which the most meaning can be extracted. What if every life begins at 100 and every new year opens on the 12th month at the 24th hour? A year where each new day greeted you with a pear-shaped glass cone full of sand asking one to pour it out with deliberate effort directed toward great labors. What if both extracting and sharing the marrow of life became a tale as new as time?