Note: I wrote this at the end of October 2020, and edited it for clarity when I refreshed the blog in March 2026.
When you have a birthday coming up, as I do, it’s natural to look back and reflect on how things have been going since your last birthday. The goal is to use what you’ve learned from the previous year to (ideally) make the next year better. The older I get, the more important this is, and the more weight the reflections carry.
My (56th) birthday is coming up in a couple of weeks, but I don’t see any reason to wait until my actual birth date to do some reflecting. Normally I just do this in my head. I don’t write anything down. I don’t make lists or concrete plans. I just spend some time thinking about it while I’m out for a walk, cleaning the house, working in the garden, or doing some other task that can be done on autopilot while my brain is busy with other things.
But this year I was inspired by Tim Urban’s article Your Life in Weeks where he uses a series of infographics to show what a 90-year lifespan looks like in terms of total weeks. 90 years is 4680 weeks, which sounds like a lot until you actually see it laid out on a grid. This article was like a hard slap in the face, making me realize with magnificent clarity just how precious time is and how much of it I was allowing to drift by without making the most of it. It is ridiculously uncomfortable to think about, but I knew I had to make some changes.
As far as I know, my female relatives usually live to reach a fairly feisty 90, so I’m sticking with Urban’s original 90-year lifespan for my own personal calculations. If I manage to dodge the most likely health-related bullets, I’m going to assume that I’ve got approximately 35 years of reasonably good health ahead of me as of my 56th birthday in November 2020.
I grabbed the nearest piece of paper and pen and scribbled out a quick-and-dirty graphic of the 35 boxes that represent the 35 years I have left to live, and marked some boxes with meaningful events.
Here is a cleaned up version of that image, with a key about what it all means.
NB: Of course I know that there are no guarantees, and that I’m not entitled to live a long, healthy life, and that I should be thankful for every single day. I’m not even COUNTING ON reaching box 57. But what the fuck, I’m also allowed to be optimistic and lay out a plan for the best-case scenario.
The box with number 56 written in it represents the year that starts on my 56th birthday. The box that says “Dad” is my “age 66” box. Alzheimer’s took my dad from us when he was 66 years old, after he’d already spent several years on the unimaginably cruel slow-train-to-hell of that godawful disease.
So what’s the point of this, you may well be asking? There is something about seeing time laid out as a simple graphic that is incredibly powerful. My goal here is to keep track of these boxes and do my best to fill them with things that feel meaningful and worthwhile.
By revisiting and redrawing the boxes each year I’m hoping to avoid letting day after day disappear into a fog of “What the hell happened today, and what did I actually do?” That happens so easily when you’re living as if there will always be plenty of boxes ahead of you. There won’t be.
So, what to do with box number 1 of 35? What will I do with the 56th year of my one life? I’ll keep the deeper, personal stuff private (something that too few people do these days, IMO) but don’t mind sharing something more general. What have I always wished I could do, but never really devoted time and energy to really learning? There are many things, but learning to draw is what I keep coming back to. So box 1 of 35 will be my “Lori learns to draw” box. You can read more about that here.