Numbers

I’ve been camping with the family these last couple days (Grayland Beach on the Washington coast, and boy it is aptly named; we haven’t seen the sun for 48 hours) and so haven’t shaved for two mornings in a row (mountain man!) thereby breaking my streak of many months consecutively, I’m sure, of running a blade over my chin and cheeks every morning, and that’ made me think, as I sometimes do, of the number of times I’ve done something in my life, like, take shaving, which, if I count it all up, say, something on the order of five times a week for about thirty years now (I don’t think I really shaved regularly until my mid-twenties), that would be, give or take a few hundred, something on the order of five thousand times I’ve done so.

And say it takes me about three to five minutes to complete my tonsure, that means I’ve spend about 15000 minutes shaving or around 250 hours or more than 10 days of my life standing in front of a mirror removing the whiskers from my face.

Wow.

Of course, that’s nothing compared to something even more commonplace, like urination; just figure: 5 to 10 times a day (let’s just say 7) for 53 years; that means I’ve peed approximately 150,000 times; suppose it takes about half a minute for each micturation; that’s 75000 minutes or 1250 hours or like about 50 days pissing constantly, all around the clock from midnight until midnight, enough to warrant a chapter in that famous book, The Yellow River, by the author I.P. Freely, haha.

Would that I could have all this time back, just think of what I might have accomplished. At the very least, I’d have had the opportunity to add to the probably 600 or so hours I’ve spent writing the almost 1200 327 word essays I’ve created, that’s about 25 days of my life I’ve spent and will never get back.