How many more times?
The writer Paul Bowles has a passage that people quote at each other in their thirties, usually late at night. The gist is that we treat the events of our lives as limitless when in fact each one will happen a small, countable number of times, and we do not know the number.
He is talking about watching the full moon rise. But the structure of the observation applies to nearly everything, which is why it stays with people: how many more times will you swim in the sea, hear your name called across a room by that particular voice, sit in your grandmother's kitchen. You do not know. You have assumed the answer is plenty, because the alternative assumption is not comfortable to carry around.
The last time looks exactly like all the others
This is the whole difficulty. Firsts announce themselves. First day of school, first flat, first time someone said the thing back to you. We photograph them.
Lasts arrive in disguise. The last time your grandfather told a story you had heard before. The last time your old group of friends were all in one room without it being organised months ahead. The last time you drove down the road you grew up on and it still looked like itself.
Every one of those had a specific date, and you were there, and you were probably thinking about something else. That is not carelessness. There is no way to live while treating every event as potentially final — it would be unbearable and you would get nothing done. But between that and the way most of us operate, which is to assume everything renews indefinitely, there is a middle position, and the middle position is just occasionally doing the arithmetic.
Build your own counter
The standard calculators cover the obvious cases: parents, children, seasons, the dog. They cover them because those are the ones that apply to almost everybody.
But the thing that actually has a small number attached to it, for you specifically, is probably not on that list. It might be your brother, who lives in another country and whom you see at weddings and funerals. It might be your oldest friend, the one you speak to twice a year and would take a bullet for. It might be a place: the house that will be sold when your parents move, the café that is being turned into a bank, the walk you can only do while your knees hold.
So make one. Pick the person or the thing, pick the unit — visits, calls, summers, dinners — and pick how often it currently happens. The arithmetic is trivial. The output is not.
What the number is actually for
Two things, and they pull in opposite directions, which is why the exercise is worth doing at all.
The first is urgency. Some numbers come out small enough that they demand a response this month. If you see your brother twice a year and your parents are the reason you both come home, that number has a shorter horizon than you were assuming.
The second is the opposite, and people do not expect it: some numbers come out large, and the largeness is a relief and an instruction. If you work out that you will likely have four hundred more dinners with your partner in the next decade, the correct response is not urgency. It is to stop treating each one as insignificant filler between the important parts. Four hundred is a lot. Four hundred is also, definitively, not infinite, and a decade from now you will have spent them.
Say the number out loud to someone
This is the part that changes behaviour, and it is the part people skip.
A number you keep to yourself is a feeling. A number you say to the person it is about becomes a plan. There is a difference between privately noticing that you have maybe thirty more visits with your oldest friend and sending him a message that says: I worked out we have about thirty of these left, so I am coming in March, pick a weekend.
The message is slightly embarrassing to send. Send it anyway. Nobody in the history of friendship has been annoyed to learn that someone did arithmetic about them.
One thing, this week
Make one counter. Give it the real name of a real person or a real place — not a category, a name. Look at what comes out.
Then take the smallest possible action that the number implies. Not a life change. A text message, a date in a calendar, a phone call that lasts nine minutes.
The moon will come up a limited number of times for you. You will not know which one is the last, and knowing would not help. What helps is remembering, a few times a year, that the number exists at all — and then going outside to look at it.