A New Metric

We foolish people, measure life by time

Lifes metric; numbered rotations

Hands across a face

Or astral palpatations

Tick-tock

Seconds to minutes,

Days to decades,

Epochs to eternities,

Measured In all manners

Except those that truly matter

Tick-tock-tick-tock

Time is not a measure of life

A life cannot be counted, in decimals nor degrees

We measure life by time spent, not life lived

Times had its time,

Tick-tock - Stop

I propose a New Metric

------

Measure not by the pounding of a pulse

Measure not by the loss for those gone

Embrace the new metric,

Measure still by the face, but no longer the hands upon it,

Measure the smiles, smirks, simpers, and scowls

Love, losses, jubilations and exaltations

Lessons learned, and lives touched

Tears, not years

A life measured by the space it fills,

The joy and ineffable importance it contains,

Not the length it runs,

The reach of its love, and the experiences created unhampered by the petty concepts of time or space,

The breadth of its influence, not by breathe of one's lungs

A life cannot be measured by numbers or quantified quality,

A life is forever and never, mortality but one moment to give it relevance we can comprehend in our own beautiful cascades

The shortest of lives can fill the greatest of spaces,

Measure no more by days or years, a slave to the clockwork precision of the old metric

Embrace the true measure, life for what it is and will always be, never what it was.

Remember those gone, for measured by the love they bore and the impacts they have, the experiences birthed and the countless possibilities seeded

Welcome the new metric; Life measured by Life

------

==Note from the Author==

I'm no poet by any means, if you read the above you'll likely concur, but I felt the need to dip a toe into these strangely scented waters. I was inspired to write this little inarticulate mental deluge by some unexpected losses recently (not me directly, but others within a couple of degrees). Reading an obituary put me into a thanatopsis of sorts. The mention of age specifically as if that actually matters. It doesn't, but we have all been preconditioned to accept it as important to some degree.

I am one of those people who take loss exceptionally hard and know many others do as well. Although I struggle to properly articulate the words I hope this in some small way gets the point across and maybe helps somebody else, as this is how I remember those gone, but not gone, and who might yet outlive me.

Don't ruminate on loss, it's a false metric. There is never enough time, we are ever insatiable. Remember what the experiences meant and the impact they had, you will always carry that with you. By this measure, I know people long gone who may yet outlive me even if I live to be a thousand years old by the rotation of the earth around the sun.