Essay excerpted from 100-Year Calendar-Poster User’s Guide.

Creating the “One of These Days…” Lifetime at a Glance 100-Year Calendar-Poster caused me to think a lot about time and lifetimes. I think about time a lot, and eternity is a lot of time to think about. So I collected my thoughts into the following essay.  It presents something to think about:

Our perception of reality defines reality, some would even say, creates it. Science searches for the nature of matter and energy, space and time. In quantum physics, particles are described by probability equations. So it is with us, our existence in time is predicted by actuarial tables, described as the probability of life expectancy.

Scientists are fond of “what if” mental experiments performed in the imagination.

What if you had only one day to live? To whom would you express your love, your forgiveness, your gratitude? What debts would you repay, what gifts would you give? What final words of wisdom would you write or speak? What would your last creation be? What is the last lesson you would want to learn? What would your last sunset look like?

What if you had only one minute to live? What would your last thoughts be? How would you make your parting with life, your peace with yourself and with your God?

What if you had only one life to live?

Maybe you believe that when you die, you live in eternity. What is eternity? Our science cannot define it. Our minds cannot comprehend it. Our language cannot describe it, except maybe to say that eternity is all the time there is. If that is so, then we do live in eternity. We have all the time there is.