La Vita Nouva

Around the time that he reached the unnerving milestone of turning thirty, Leonardo da Vinci wrote a letter to the ruler of Milan listing the reasons he should be given a job. He had been moderately successful as a painter in Florence, but he had trouble first his commissions and was searching for new horizons. In the first ten paragraphs, he touted his engineering skills, including his ability to design bridges, waterways, cannons, armored vehicles, and public buildings. Only in the eleventh paragraph, at the end, did he add that he was also an artist. “Likewise in painting I can do everything possible,” he wrote.

I have been alive for 8,614 days (1,230 weeks, or 23.58 orbits around the Sun); that is, by the arithmetic of the calendar, but by the stranger arithmetic of memory, and since conscious experience seems to begin around age 3.5, I have inhabited the world knowingly for roughly 7,336 days (20.1 years). So far this comes to 291 full moons, 94 seasons, and an estimated 137,824,000 spoken words which I hope were more often careful, kind, and useful than otherwise.

Set against the 300,000 years history of Homo sapiens, all this amounts to only 0.00786128%, less than a mark in the margin of the species, barely a flicker in the long human story. And yet consciousness is what gives scale its irony; for one mind, this thin fraction has already contained worlds, mornings and losses, recognitions and revisions, confessions, affections, convictions, mistakes, recoveries, extraordinary moments, although some might sound ordinary someitmes.

According to current WHO estimates, the global average life expectancy is 73.3 years, which means I have lived 32.2% of that expectation, with 2,594 weeks (18,159 days, or about 49.7 years) left. That's my uncertain allowance of time in which I have to pay better attention, to make better things, to be good, and to leave the world, where I can, a little gentler than I found it.