The Man Who Counted Sunsets

I once knew a man — I will call him Harold — who kept a running count of the sunsets he had left. He had done the arithmetic on a napkin in his early forties. Average life expectancy. Current age. Assume nothing dramatic. He subtracted. The number he arrived at was, he claimed, 'not enough sunsets to justify a bad mood.'

Harold was, in most other respects, an ordinary man. He worked in insurance. He owned a beige sedan. He had strong opinions about lawn care. But he had this one strange practice: every evening, at whatever hour the sun went down where he happened to be, he stopped whatever he was doing, walked outside, and watched it. He did this in parking lots. He did this in traffic. He did this once, memorably, in the middle of a conference, waving apologetically at his colleagues on his way out.

'I have about six thousand of these left,' he would say cheerfully. 'You expect me to skip one for a slide deck?'

You could tell yourself Harold was morbid. It would be easier. But if you spent any time with him you noticed the opposite. He was, without exception, the most present person in the room. He remembered your children's names. He asked what you were reading. He listened to the answer. His conversations were unhurried, because he was not, in fact, in a hurry. He was rich in the only currency that actually spends: attention.

The rest of us are the strange ones. We behave as though our sunsets are infinite. We skip Tuesdays because there will be another Tuesday. We put off the phone call because there will be time next month. We assume the person across the table will still be across the table a year from now. Sometimes they will be. Sometimes they will not.

You do not need a napkin. You do not need Harold's exact number. You only need to hold, once in a while, the honest fact that this Tuesday will not come around again. The sunset outside your window is a one-time offer.

You do not have to walk out of a conference to notice it. You only have to look up. Say the thing you keep almost saying. Make the call. Sit with the child. Eat the meal slowly.

The Harold in this story is not, of course, real. But every once in a while, when the light in the west turns that specific orange, I catch myself doing his math. Not many left, I think. Not many at all. Then I stop what I am doing, and I watch.