“For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?”
– T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Imagine a calendar of every week of your life. 52 points across 90 rows. Each point represents a week. Each row represents a year. As weeks pass, you darken each point like a bubble sheet for a big exam. However, by the time one is old enough to even be interested in a measurement like this, over twenty years of life have already passed and a quarter of the calendar is now filled. 1,040 points darkened, with only 3,640 points to go.
How does one lay out their life in weeks and not face a massive wave of pressure? We build up so many goals and societal standards to surround our every thought and ambition for each week, day, hour, minute… How can we overcome the need for this ticking clock to truly embrace our fate and to live a full life?
With 1,218 weeks down myself, and no signs of these points slowing down, I am ready to explore a more open passage of our temporality.
We inherently love our schedules, our routines, the ability to map out the unknown to a point where it is controllable and structured. If I make plans to go out for dinner on a Friday night next week, I have taken control over the future. With this control, I am no longer faced with the unbearable anxiety that comes with the unknown.
We see this anxiety in our facing of death through promises of an afterlife. When we reach 4,680 points on our calendar, what comes next? We can no longer make an effort to take over the outcome. In response, death becomes our greatest fear. To combat this fear, we hand off the reins in order to keep going. We trade uncertainty for comfort, and in doing so lose our most authentic gift: the experience of living.
To misinterpret finitude is to miss out on infinity. Living a measured life is like digging a tunnel. The further you dig, the deeper you go. It will be harder to turn back and the light above you will grow smaller as time passes. You can dig wider to be more comfortable and you can even dig yourself out, but it is much easier to go down an open path, where you are not concealed by darkness. You can look around at the world as it takes shape. Look forward and you will see what the future can be if you choose to keep going. Look backward and see where you have come from.
The open path is a limitless opportunity. In our tunnels we are concealed by the certainty that is formed around us, each point on a calendar of life. We cannot fall or get lost when moving through a tunnel or following the regimen we set forth, but adventure is lost. Experience is lost.
We were never meant to count coffee spoons, never mind digging tunnels with them.
Noonpath 
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