Countdown to meaning

...beautiful world, where art thou?

When life starts to feel like a countdown to death - each year a tick, each birthday a gong - it can be strangely clarifying. A little terrifying, but clarifying.

You begin to notice how we are trained to make meaning through milestones: the board exams, the college admissions, the first job, the promotion, the wedding, the baby, the silver anniversary. A life punctuated by bullet points, by events deemed worthy of celebration or commemoration.

It’s a neat system, really. It keeps you moving. It helps you forget that the line connecting all those dots is quietly thinning out, moving forward even when you are not. You can be sleepwalking and still arrive somewhere.

But what happens when you wake up mid-sentence and realise the punctuation is all wrong? That the achievements feel hollow, or worse, irrelevant? That you don’t remember large chunks of your life - not because they were traumatic, but because they were boring, passive, uninhabited? When every “next thing” starts to feel like just another item on the conveyor belt of time, not something you chose but something you walked into out of inertia?

It’s tempting to panic. Or to overcorrect. To quit your job, move cities, dye your hair. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it’s just noise.

But maybe the more enduring path isn’t to chase milestones or erase them - but to reclaim the spaces in between. To focus not just on what happens, but how it happens. How you walk to the grocery store. How you greet a friend. How you make your tea. Not for the Instagram of it, but for the pulse of it. To let those moments matter just as much as the degrees and the job offers and the wedding photos.

Because milestones don’t make meaning. Attention does.

When life feels like a countdown, the goal isn’t to distract yourself from death - it’s to live in a way that makes the countdown irrelevant. Not because you're denying the end, but because you're too busy being - in love, in pain, in awe - to measure how close you're getting.

In that version of life, the calendar fades. You become less obsessed with outcomes and more curious about presence. Milestones still happen. But they no longer define you. You do.

And sometimes, the most radical thing you can do is to quietly, insistently, pay attention. Not because you're trying to win time, but because you're finally using it.

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P.S. If something in this piece stirred you - an echo, a memory, a pause - I’d love to hear from you. Hit reply, leave a comment, or simply sit with it a while. I write to make sense of things, and sometimes, your reflections help me do that better.
And if you think someone else might need to read this today, feel free to pass it on.

Love, Anna 💕