Alive

I am alive. Every so often, at fairly regular intervals, I breathe in. The oxygen I breathe diffuses across thin capillaries in my lungs. From there it enters my blood stream and is carried to every cell in my body. In each of these billions of cells there is a flurry of activity as they grow, metabolize, and reproduce -- enacting their own rough approximation of our human existence. And it is life. But it also is death because in my life I will only breathe in so many times. Resting I breathe about once per second. Assuming that times of strenuous activity are offset by times of deep rest, if I live to be 90 years old exactly I will breathe approximately 2,838,240,000 times. That's just over 2.8 billion times. Right now I have lived for 21 years, 5 months, 27 days, and somewhere over 12 hours. That means that I have already breathed somewhere near 680,529,600 times. That means I have about 2.2 billion breathes left to take. There goes one. And another one. I'm counting down slowly. Counting to 2.2 billion, and then I won't breathe any more. For every cell that I create, one dies. And it's getting harder and harder to keep that ratio up. It won't be long, if it hasn't started already, that I will lose cells faster than I make them. My body will age and fail and die. In less than 2.2 billion breathes. But for some reason I still tried to get the closest parking spot tonight. My life is running down as I speak and I still worried about how my clothes look before I left the house. And I am completely representative of the human race in general by doing so. Any moment I may breathe my last. 2.2 billion is the upper limit, it could turn out that I only have 700 million breathes in my life. Any moment could be my last. But I still spend hours a day playing video games. I plan for what I am going to do years from now, without really paying attention to what I'm doing now. I complain, I make promises, I procrastinate --– in general I live as though my life is going to last for a very long time to come. And it may. 2.2 billion breaths is a pretty long time. A lot can be accomplished in that time. A lot of life lived. But in the end I certainly will die. There is nothing I can do to change that. But I usually never think of that. We obsess with being alive and staying that way, and we rarely think about the fact that no matter how hard we try it's only a matter of time until we fail. I will die. I've thought for a long time that I'd come to terms with that. In some ways I have. The idea doesn't scare me; I'm not in denial about the fact. But I am in denial about exactly what that means and exactly how fast that time is coming. I live each day as though it doesn't really matter, as though it's just another day in an endless series. I breathe each breath as though I will go on breathing forever. Although my mind has accepted the fact that I will die, my life does not show a comprehension of that reality. I hope that changes before I lose too many breaths. If I only get so many, I want to make each one count. I want to be fully alive in every moment as long as I still have some breaths left in me. I want to live life to the fullest, fully aware that it will end soon. I am aware of the world around me. My senses are rich and vivid. I breathe in. And I exhale.