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Perspective 650,000

Michael Thallium, Global & Greatness Coach

Michael Thallium, Global & Greatness Coach

Hello! Thank you and congratulations! Thanks for making it to get here and congratulations because it hasn’t been easy. If there exist miracles, I’d say, no wonder, this is one of them. To start with, just the fact you are reading this not to say understanding it has taken a lot of work from your side. You have spent many years of your life learning how to combine thousands of different combinations among a, b, c, d, e, f… and all those letters which build up the “alphabet”. But it is not only that. Apart from learning lots of words, you also had to learn how to combine them so that they can make any sense to you or anybody else and, if that were not enough, it just so happens that your anatomy your mouth, your lips, your teeth, your tongue, your vocal folds allows you to enunciate them as easily as if you were just breathing and I didn’t mention the amount of orders your brain has to send to your many face muscles so that, for instance, “phase” sounds “phase” and not “face”. On top of that, we are lucky enough to share the same communication code, in this case, English. Trust me, it’s a miracle! If I would be now writing in German, you wouldn’t understand a word unless you could also understand that code. In the world we are living today at the beginning of the 21st Century, it seems English has become a lingua franca or bridge language. But it hasn’t always been like that. French would have been that bridge language roughly 150 years ago, and a few more centuries back, Latin, Arabic or Greek would have been the languages of reference. On the other hand, if we just look at the number of native speakers of a language, the most spoken language in the world is Mandarin Chinese followed by Spanish. If you are reading and understanding this, it is because you and me have been born in a part of the world where, what a paradox!, Chinese sounds Greek to us!

But it doesn’t stop there. In order for you to have gotten here, your parents had to get together and mate at a certain point, and so did your grandparents and the parents of your grandparents and your greatgrandparents’ parents… It’s only 80 generations that separate us from that moment where we started to count time in our modern calendar in most countries in the world, some 21 centuries ago. Don’t think 2,000 years is a long time. Actually, it seems to be very little. Our species, the one we agreed to call homo sapiens (the man who knows), appeared around 195,000 years ago. If you think that’s a lot, let me tell you you are quite wrong. The Earth dates back to around 4,500 million years… And before us, there existed many other species we cannot even think of. The Earth is the only planet which harbours intelligent life. No matter how much we want to dream or fantasize about life in other planets or other solar systems. The truth is that we are alone here. And we are likely to go on like this for some thousands of years more.

Let me say it again: Thank you and congratulations! We’ve made it, trust me, against all odds! There’s nothing like putting things into perspective. Our lives, as important as they can be to us, are insignificant depending on the perspective you take. If we agree that the average life expectancy of a person is around 74 years when I am writing these lines, there are some countries in the world where life expectancy is over 80 years whereas in some other countries it is less than 40 years, then, everyone of us will spend around 650,000 hours on this planet. Supposing that I ever reach 74, I’ve already used up 372,000 hours of my time here. So, I’ve only got around 278,000 hours more to live. Each and every of our lives represent much less than 0.01% of the time since the homo sapiens first trod the Earth. We are just a mere instant.

However, it’s not all about quantity but about quality. Why get bitter and suck the life out of ourselves or any other people? Why engage in any kind of a toxic relationship that only poisons the extremely limited time we spend on the face of the Earth? What prevent us from being happy and making those around us happy?

There may be several reasons why you are reading this. Maybe you know me in person and you are curious about my writing, unlikely; maybe you just heard of me or my name somewhere and you just ended up reading me, it could be; however, you are more likely to have bumped into this article by pure chance, you may not even know me at all and most probably we’ll never meet, but for some reason that you only know, you have kept reading to this point. In any of those cases, once again: I thank you and congratulations! Thanks for sharing a negligible part of your time with me. Congratulations because, somehow, we have just coincided. And if I have ever had the immense fortune that you are part of my life and I was also lucky enough to contribute to your happiness the same way you have contributed to mine, my heartfelt thanks to you. It hasn’t been easy. We have made it against all odds. Perspective 650,000.

Michael Thallium
Global Greatness Coach
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