Two Thousand Weeks

“How many weeks do you think we have?” I ask my friend Aurora on FaceTime while she’s driving, a habit her husband and also law enforcement frown upon. “Like, to live?”

“Well, there’s fifty-two weeks in a year,” she starts, which is not the answer I am looking for.

“No,” I say, groaning because there’s few people I like to be as over-the-top dramatic with as Aurora. “You’re not supposed to do math.”

Aurora and I met at a comedy festival in Los Angeles years ago. It was a weekday morning and I was sitting with a handful of other comics, drinking bad coffee in one of the festival’s workshops about branding. When the workshop leader asked for a volunteer, Aurora and I both raised our hands. She was chosen and instructed to stand on stage without saying a word while the rest of us shouted our first impressions of her.

“TALL!”

“BROWN!”

“EATS MEAT!”

This exercise was meant to illuminate how audiences judge performers before we say a single word, and how to use those preconceived notions in your act. Aurora left the stage with a giant piece of paper on which the workshop leader had scribbled our snap judgements in thick black marker. When a group of us went to Chipotle for lunch afterward, I told her how jealous I was that she got to have all that material, which is about the time she started offering her judgments of me.

We’ve been friends ever since.

“Maybe five thousand?” she says, flying down a California freeway, late for her weekly acting class. “Or wait. Four-thousand?”

“FOUR THOUSAND,” I respond, even though she’s ruined the big reveal with her accurate accounting. “If we live to be eighty, we’ll get about four thousand weeks.”

“Well, that’s depressing,” she sighs. “And you’re already halfway there.”

I haven’t been able to shake this fact since I read it in a book recently, aptly entitled “4,000 Weeks.” I’ve burned through more than half my weeks and am staring down the barrel at the rest.

“That reminds me of that one Eddie Murphy quote,” Aurora offers. “That if we’re lucky, we only get eighty summers.”

“Now that’s depressing,” I recoil. “That number is way too small.”

After the initial shock of these numbers wore off, I started to find them clarifying.

Now, when I reach for my phone to scroll through social media, I pause. Do I really want to spend my finite time feeding my brain to algorithms? This doesn’t always stop me, but when I’m scrolling away I can at least tell myself I made a conscious decision.

I decided to waste this hour on Reddit reading a passionate argument about e-ink tablets. I’m so evolved.

I’m working on a video for my channel at the moment that will be a recap of this past year of travel. Sifting through footage from the seven cities on three continents I visited almost doesn’t feel real; was that really me climbing an ancient tower in Porto? Did I actually plant that coffee tree in Colombia? And was I seriously horseback riding through vineyards in Argentina?

Watching these moments play back on my computer screen feels like they happened to someone else; I remember being there, sure, but I was also so consumed with trying to understand my past or worrying about my future that I missed so much of what was right in front of me.

Thankfully, I had a camera rolling for most of it.

I’ve been stuck on this video’s script for a while now, trying to sort out what exactly it is I’ve learned from my travels, what I want to share.

I learned Spanish, or at least enough to not sound like a fool. I learned what it’s like to be single at forty, and also what it’s like to start dating again. But mostly I’ve been trying to learn to stay present and focused, so hopefully I can make the next two thousand weeks count.