Measuring Your Life

A friend of mine recently told me about a book she read called The Measure, by Nikki Erlick.  The premise of the book is that one day, out of the blue, every single person over the age of 22 receives a mysterious wooden box.  Inside each person’s box is a string, and the length of that string corresponds to the length of that person’s life. This book really got me thinking about how we measure our lives. 

What if, suddenly, you knew the length of your remaining time on earth?  How would it change you?  Collectively, how would this knowledge change our society, and humanity? 

Sad to say, but one of the first real impacts of the appearance of the strings was one that we would probably expect to see in our society today.  Immediately, the world used the strings to be just one more reason to divide ourselves.  The “short-stringers” and the “long-stringers” became instantly suspicious of each other. 

The leading presidential candidate (a long-stringer) professed that short-stringers should automatically be disqualified from the presidential race and declared unfit for office, for obvious reasons.  A few short-stringers, learning that their time on earth was limited, were affected in ways that led them to lash out and violently attack others.  The resulting perception of instability among short-stringers only fueled the divisions and misperceptions, and fueled discrimination against “pyscho” short-stringers.  Even service in the military was restricted to long-stringers.  After all, what good would it do to send an army of short-stringers into battle somewhere?      

I found myself wondering how I would handle this sort of knowledge about my life.  First, would I even want to know?  Would I even want to open my box?  Many in the book did not.  Wouldn’t it be better if you just didn’t know how long your string was? 

If you did open your box and found out you were a short-stringer, how would it change you?  Would it change how you dream?  Would it cause you to give up on your dreams?  Would it make you angry?  Depressed?  Would you want others close to you to know how long your string was?

How would you handle knowing the length of the strings of others in your life?  Would it change your relationships?  Would you be more selective in friendships?  If you were young and dating, would string length be a criterion for you?  Could you handle knowing the length of your child’s string?  What if yours was short and theirs was long?

If you were a long-stringer, would that affect how you treated others?  Would you invest in relationships the same way you do now?  And after all, what does a long life really mean?  Could it be a life long in years, but poor in quality and bereft of relationships and joy?

The point of this very thoughtful book is this:  no matter how long our string, life should be lived as large as we can. Short or long, our lives should be full of big dreams, full of hope regardless of circumstances, fully experiencing every minute of each precious day.  As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “It is not the length of life, but the depth of life.”  The book reminds us that some of mankind’s most remarkable achievements, important discoveries, and beautiful creations were made by short-lived people.  Consider also how a donated lung from a 22 year-old accident victim can immediately change another’s life, exchanging a short-string for a long-string, just like that!

Until a box with a string in it arrives at my front door, I think I’ll just live like a long-stringer would!  As Nina, one of the characters, put it, “Perhaps the length didn’t matter.  The beginning and the end may have been chosen for us, the string already spun, but the middle had always been left undetermined, to be woven and shaped by us.” 

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world
and a desire to savor the world.  That makes it hard to plan the day. 

– E.B. White