A Model of Life

I’ll start off with another person’s article on life.

That was Oliver Emberton. He wrote about life.

I liked the article a lot. To summarise, he talked about life in stages, and the themes that are important in each stage. A major part of the young adult stage is about choosing the right things to focus on, and then working on them. Which is what my previous post talked about too…because life is limited.

Mark Manson in his article has a similar idea too. His article is about how life is limited, and there are different overall purposes during each of the 4 stages of life.

From all these, I have de-constructed the components and came up with:

The components of Life

as per below:

 

A. Time 

Time is the currency of life.

Whatever you do, you need time.

Be it eating, sleeping, spending time with family and friends, pattering about at your hobbies, serving the community and pursuing your dreams, all of these require time.

And so we all pay for our lives with the time we are given.

With each ticking of the second hand, one unit of your life is gone.

And that is also why time management is crucial to leading a satisfying life. Otherwise our lives will slip away from us before we even notice what has happened. How we choose to spend our time and what we spend our time on is important.

And if time is the smallest unit of life, then the bigger blocks of things made from the small lego pieces of time are:

 

1. Activities

Activities are what what you spend time on. Just like how we use money to buy things, we exchange time for activities. These activities can be anything – stoning, hanging out with friends, eating, bathing, doing work, watching YouTube videos, scrolling through Facebook, writing blogs, writing stories, and so on.

 

2. Events

A series of activities can be joined together to form an event. Events are what will register in our memories, because time is too small an unit and too abstract for us to anchor in memory. Events are what will come to mind when we look back at our lives.

 

3. People

Self explanatory. The human beings you are born to and will meet in your life.

 

4. Values

The beliefs and things you will come to choose and live out.

 

Now, let me go back to the part on us having to choose what to spend our time on. As everyone of us only has 80 or so years of life, it is vital to wisely choose the activities, events, people and values we spend our time on. Living like we have an eternity ahead of us might feel good in the moment, but the more of your life you waste away, the worst your existential crisis will hit when one day, the undeniable fact that you. will. die. stares at you in the eyes and punches you in the gut like a 100 pound hammer.

You.

Will.

Die.

That is a fact.

And so, the next component is important too:

 

5. Intention

The last component of life. Your intention. Or perhaps your lack of one. Perhaps you let life happen to you. Perhaps whatever that life throws at you, you just react. Perhaps you take the easiest path whenever you can.

Or perhaps you fight against the current of life, always swimming upstream.

I think most people take the middle path, trying to strike a balance between what they want, and what life imposes.

Whatever it is, remember that your intention is important. Remember that your choices matter.

 

And so as human beings, we live out our days, second by second, choice by choice, shaped by our intentions, surrounded by the people and values and activities and events we choose, until the day our clock strikes 0.

 

 

Last edited on 27 Sep 2016 (when I was a sweet 22), completed on 7 Jun 2019 (25 years old)