Measuring our lives in inches

I have always been a fan of charts. To me a graphic representation of numbers has always helped me to understand the relevance of amounts. I occasionally graph my expenses in order to check out where the money is going. I then concentrate on the tall bars in the graph and figure that if I can reduce a large bar by 10 percent, that may amount to a 20 percent reduction of the total whereas reducing a small bar by 20 percent may only reduce the total by three percent.

A friend of mine from Reno recently visited. In the evenings while relaxing we often got philosophical discussing life and attitudes, etc. Conrad has been very successful at just about everything he has tried. He has several successful businesses and managed to survive the recent recession and has things going well again but had been going through a bad time personally. While discussing this he showed me how he was going to handle his new problems. He took a tape measure and pulled it out to 75 inches. He said that 75 is about how long the average man lives. He then grabbed the tape at 55 and said that represented how old he was. The part of the tape from one to 54 fell on the floor. He said, “That part of my life is gone and done. I can change nothing about that part.”