Today I am 26,000 days old. Why do I count the days? A day is the unit in which we experience our lives. Counting the days makes them more precious to me and reminds me how little time is left.
How did I compute? Obviously, multiplying my years by 365 doesn’t work, because it ignores the leap years of my life. So I use the Julian Day Number (JDN).
“The Julian Day Number (JDN) is the integer assigned to a whole solar day in the Julian day count starting from noon Universal time, with Julian day number 0 assigned to the day starting at noon on Monday, January 1, 4713 BC, proleptic Julian calendar (November 24, 4714 BC, in the proleptic Gregorian calendar), a date at which three multi-year cycles started (which are: Indiction, Solar, and Lunar cycles) and which preceded any dates in recorded history. For example, the Julian day number for the day starting at 12:00 UT (noon) on January 1, 2000, was 2 451 545.” WIKIPEDIA
There are various tools to calculate the JDN. This is the one I use:
http://www.warumwieso.de/Kalender-Berechnung.html
But enough of numbers and computing. Here are some lines from one of my favourite poems:
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
