Finding Peace Between Our Days and Death

The Unit of Life hardest to measure

The smallest Unit of Life is the second. Not to get too granular, but sometimes what you do with your seconds is the most important part of your life.

Your seconds are your reactions. The infinitesimal moment of choice between calm and chaos, resilience and fragility, courage and cowardliness, values and vile. How we respond in the narrow window between stimulus and response is who we ultimately are. Training in virtue is training to become the kind of people who can respond with our better angels in the moments when we are least prepared.

From there, the Units of Life get larger. Our minutes, hours, days, etc all the way up the largest Unit of Life which is your Whole Life. We have little to no control over the circumstances of our Whole Life. Even our choices are conditioned upon the circumstances we were born into, the opportunities afforded us, the messages spoken over or withheld from our lives.

The larger the Unit of Life, the less control we have over it.
The smaller the Unit of Life, the more control we have.

I don’t have much control over the next decade, but I have more control than not over today. Annie Dillard famously reminds us, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

I’m a big believer in closely examining and being intentional about both the small and large Units of Life alike. We need to cultivate good habits day to day and reverse engineer our lives as we patiently await our death.

But there is another and oft-overlooked Unit of Life that rests between our seconds and our Whole Lives. It’s less clear-cut, more arbitrary, and not as time-bound as the others, but it’s just as necessary to consider. It’s also different from the other Units in that there can be multiple at a time. Instead of a chronological sequence of time, this Unit multiplies and overlaps, it layers and adds complexity to our lives.

This Unit is, of course,