Sublime Subliminal

Space and time are not conditions in which we live. They are modes in which we think.
    - Einstein -

Actually true. I can't get too excited over life and death questions because I have a realistic grasp on the concept of time. 

The universe has existed for about 13.8 billion years. That means that someone who has lived as long as Methuselah (let's round it off to 1000 years) will have lived about 0.0000072%of the life of the universe. That means if the age of the universe is represented as a ruler-straight line from the furthest north corner of the panhandle of to the furthest southern tip of Texas (800 miles, almost exactly, oddly enough), our mythic 1000 year old man's lifespan would be — 3.65 INCHES. About the width of either piece of a dollar bill torn in half.  

Your more reasonable lifespan, not more than 1/10th of Methuselah's, is about .365 INCHES on this 800 mile long line — about the thickness of five nickles stacked together.

I'm thinking as you flash along this line getting from one end to the other at an average of 50 miles per hour for 16 hours, you'll detect no difference between 3.65 inches, 0.365 inches, and ZERO inches. 

In other words, in terms of deep time your life flashes by so quickly it almost doesn't exist at all. Every single thing in your life from birth to death, every breath, yoga class, cleverness, clumsiness, pain, joy, struggle, victory, or defeat, every last-ditch effort to squeeze one more month or year or decade out of it — all of it is an invisible, subliminal blip on the timeline of our universe, whether it lasts six months or a thousand years. Even living 10,000 years would only give you a single "Giant Step" (about a yard) on the 800 mile line. If our entire race lasts 5,000,000 years as recognizable as humans (and there's no slightest indication that we're going to get anything REMOTELY close to that — we're in less than a million now) we're still only using up about 1/4 mile of our 800 mile timeline.

And all this, mind you, is just the universe from beginning to now. There are some really good estimates at least to order of magnitude that the universe itself will finally fade away to heat death in approximately 10^103 years — a timespan in which our entire universe's 13.8 billion years from beginning to now shrinks to, for all practical purposes, zero. 

You are literally a near-non-existent flash in a microscopically thin slice of time less than a breath from the beginning of time itself.

 
I dunno — the Stoics and I would use all these facts to remind you — don't sweat the small stuff, and it's all small stuff. Yeah, I know. Trite. But true nonetheless. Take a breath, revel in the fact that you're alive this second, right now, and let the rest of the universe take care of itself. You're just along for the ride anyhow, and your only control over any of it is how you live it within yourself.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
     — Mark Twain —

In Our Next Episode: More Stuff. Fewer Quotes.