Hi,

If you're subscribed to my other newsletter, you'll know that I just became a father for the second time!

Gloria's entrance onto the stage of our lives has meant my computer screen time has massively reduced over the past couple weeks.

My inbox is full of unread messages, and I've barely done any writing.

And yet, my posture is still crooked and my attention span still gnat-like. Maybe it's just me that's the problem, not the Internet?

It also means this edition of the newsletter will be reasonably brief.

Understanding that I'm going to die

The birth of a tiny child tends to remind me about the stages of life. Birth, childhood, adulthood, death, and whatever's in-between. Gloria's so small that when she's in a blanket, from a distance it just looks like a crumpled empty blanket. But this will soon change. She'll be like our son soon enough, running around everywhere and babbling attempts at words. This crumpled blanket stage will end.

When will the last crumpled blanket be?

There is a popular recent book by Oliver Burkeman called 4000 Weeks all about this. Apparently 4000 weeks is the average human lifespan. Burkeman calls on the reader to think about their life in terms of these weeks, as it gives you a better sense of time, a grip on how much you really have:

Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son, a thought that appalls me, but one that's hard to deny since I surely won't be doing it when he's 30, there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home or swim in the ocean or make love or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend.

Yet usually there'll be no way to know in the moment itself that you're doing it for the last time. We should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we'd show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed, there's a sense in which every moment of life is our last time. It arrives. You'll never get it again. And once it's passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before.

I haven't read the book, but I have listened to interviews with Burkeman, and I've listened to this one from NPR's Lifekit several times. It's only 19 minutes. You can also read the transcript instead which is much quicker.

That's it for this week. Look after yourselves.

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / Procrastilearning.com / More stuff

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