You might be familiar with the poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. If not, you should read it here or listen to me read it here (yes, this happened.) It’s a beautiful poem, and one that might make you think. This is an excerpt I particularly like:
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
On a related note, I recently started taking calcium every day in the form of a chocolate chew. I take one every morning, after I drink my coffee so my mouth is warm and it makes the chocolate flavor taste better. Every day a chew, every day a wrapper – a little trace of my life. It got me thinking – what else could I measure my life in? What are the other little traces? So you can read them below, and some are measurable and some are less so. As an added challenge, I drew some of these things.
I have measured out my life with:
- Calcium chew wrappers
- Empty coffee cups
- Used strands of floss
- Birthday cards
- LinkedIn connections
- Pounds gained and lost over the past years
- GPA
- Salary
- Facebook friends and tags
- Words written
- Email drafts
- Journal entries
- Ink stains on the bed
- Kitkat wrappers found in bed.
- Boarding passes
- Ticket stubs
- Number of pimples popped
- Number of emails answered
- Protein bar wrappers
- Burned matches
- Takeaway boxes
- Onion peels
- Shopping bags
- High fives
- Hugs
- Laughs
- Belly laughs
- The kind of laugh where you laugh so hard you cry
- Minutes spent living.
- Minutes spent like, actually living.
Snotting black 