In 2017, during my two-week stay at New Skete Monastery, I found myself obsessed with numbers. In my small room on the first night, I calculated I would be there for 1,286,000 seconds. That number felt overwhelming – until I did some other math that changed my perspective forever.
At forty-nine, if I lived to the average male life expectancy of seventy-eight, I had about 10,495 days left. Subtract sleep time, and it's really only 7,871 days. Just twenty-nine summers.
Twenty-nine summers left. Let that sink in.
When I thought about my parents, both eighty-eight at the time, I realized if they lived to ninety-two (and I prayed they live much longer), I would only see them sixteen more times based on my current visit schedule of four times per year.
Sixteen visits. That's it.
That math hit me hard. I booked a flight to see them immediately.
We often think about our relationships with people – our spouses, children, friends, and family. But we rarely examine our relationship with time itself. In the monastery, where time moved like molasses, I gained a new appreciation for this relationship.
I learned an Italian proverb that changed my perspective: "If you can't live longer, live deeper."
And guess what? I tripled my visits with my parents before they passed.
