My CMS The View from a New City

Here is an extended excerpt from the book, Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman:

What I can confirm, though, is that if you can adopt the outlook we’re exploring here even just a little–if you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being and on what small amount of being you get–you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time…From an everyday standpoint, the fact that life is finite feels like a terrible insult, “a sort of personal affront, a taking away of one’s time.” in the words of one scholar. There you were, planning to live on forever–as the old Woody Allen line has it, not in the hearts of your countrymen, but in your apartment–but now here comes mortality to steal away the life that was rightfully yours.

Yet on reflection, there’s something very entitled about this attitude. Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality an outrageous violation? …Surely only somebody who’d failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as a given–as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time, maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.