Days Remaining

Turning off the lights at night doesn’t mean you fall asleep right away. If you're both awake then you can have some pretty odd conversations in the dark.

In my thirties I would sometimes lay awake in bed and do a rough mental calculation about how many days I'd been alive and then I'd assume I was about halfway through life, so I must also have *at least* an equal number of days remaining. So in my mid-thirties I would have estimated that I had lived about 12,500 days - and therefore I would live another 12,500 days which would bring me to about 70 years of age. The odd thing was that as I got older I always doubled the number of days I'd been alive and therefore I kept increasing my projected life expectancy. It seemed I was always half-way through life.

A couple of years ago Robin and I were both laying awake in bed talking about this idea. We were starting to reach a point where I was going to have to admit we might have passed the midpoint. After all, what age can you count on attaining?

So it was on June 16th, 2006 when we went to bed, I would have still been erroneously projecting about 13,000 days left for each of us - but in reality Robin went to sleep with only 247.