Does life get narrower the further you go?
As I was listening to a wonderful album by Passenger and friends, The Flight of the Crow, I finally reached the end of the album. While the experience was wrapping up and winding down, he spoke of life coming to its close too. He said that “Life gets narrower the further you go.”
Is it true? Are our lives “bullets … fired from shotguns flying through birthdays and new years?”
Does life get narrower the further you go?
In one sense it is definitely true. As we live through each year of our life, we are also one year closer to our death. But, then again, we don’t count down our birthdays…
We count them up.
It isn’t like each year I gather around with family and friends, and sit in front of a cake with 54 candles on it and celebrate the expected amount of years I have left to live. So, in one sense we aren’t counting our lives down, and watching them get narrower, but instead adding them up and watching our life grow.
Though, there is another aspect to our life getting narrower. This is in pace of life. As we get older, life seems to move faster and faster. This is for lots of reasons, but one is that we simply have more of life already lived, so that each minute, hour, and year compiled is a smaller percentage of our life.
For example, if I were two years old, then a year would total half of my experience on earth. Whereas at my current age of nineteen, a year is only 5% of my life. For my late grandfather at the time of his death, a year was only one percent of his life.
This means that each year will “feel” faster than the last as it totals less of our life in terms of percentage. But, this doesn’t mean that it is narrower. In fact, a year of life is still a year of life. Children learn faster and their brains improve more at age one than mine at age nineteen, so in one respect a year of life for a child is actually much more experientially than my year.
Not only that, but each year of life a person should grow in virtue and wisdom, and hence, their souls should be larger and fuller. By this logic, if you are a better man at the end then at the beginning, than the end of your life is not narrow, but massive and wide in comparison to the start.
So grow your life, and make it wider.