There is a simple exercise that changed how I think about time, and it takes about two minutes. Take something you care about and count how many more times it will realistically happen. Not in the abstract, where the future feels open-ended and effectively infinite, but as an actual number. How many more long summer holidays with the people you love. How many more years your body will let you do the hard mountain trip. How many more times you will see a particular friend who lives far away, given how often you currently manage it.

The numbers are almost always shockingly small. And the shock is instructive, because it reveals how much of our planning rests on an unexamined assumption that there will always be more. We defer the trip because there is always next year. Each deferral is reasonable in isolation, and each one quietly spends one unit from a count we never looked at. The future does not feel scarce, because it arrives one ordinary day at a time. But the things that matter most to us are often precisely the things that happen only once a year, and a once-a-year thing has a very short list.

I do not offer this as a morbid exercise, although I understand why it might read that way. In my experience it does the opposite. Seeing something as a count rather than an endless horizon makes priorities rearrange themselves almost immediately. It is clarifying rather than depressing. So, as a reflection for today: pick one thing you care about and count the remaining summers. What would you do differently if you took that number seriously?