It’s weird. When I was younger, a year used to seem like such a long time. And for good reason, I suppose; when I was five, one year was 20% of my life. But now, one year is just under 4% of my life. One day is barely over one hundredth of one percent. Holy shit!
Now why should I feel any sense of responsibility toward a period of my life that constitutes a trifling hundredth of a percent?
And yet, when I look back on these 324 months I have lived, I can say that a cumulative 1% of my life has bore the most significant impact. That one percent did not come in one lump sum, but in bits and pieces: a conversation, a small gesture here and there, a chapter from a book — fractions coming in tenths, hundreds, thousandths, billionths, added together — microscopic golden epiphanies, embroidered into a quilt of giddy, giddy sloth.
I want golden embroidery to equate to more than one percent of my quilt. And yet with each passing day, the quilt helplessly expands, and the same quantity of golden thread that was once one percent is now becoming a smaller and smaller proportion, subsumed into the fabric of complacent inertia.
One hundredth of a percent does matter. Each day should be an indelible thread, and my quilt should radiate extraordinary simplicity.
Dammit.
OK, time for a nap.
