PHOTO PROVIDED Art Stevens

Who says life is short? If you live to be ninety you’ll have seen the dawn of a new day some 32,850 times. Yes, we would live 32,850 days. Now how would you like to listen to the clang of the same alarm clock for about 20,000 of those days?

It’s hard to imagine the magnitude of the number 32,850 if you take the attitude that life is short. I take the attitude that life is long, not short. If I realized when I was twenty that I’d still have up to 20,000 more days — that’s 20,000 not 2,000 or even 5,000 — but 20,000, I would have slowed myself down a bit. I would have done more things then that I enjoy now, like nap a lot.

And if you divide the number of days you’d live until the age of ninety by 24 hours a day it would boggle your mind even further. You’d live 788,400 hours. In minutes? It would be 47,304,000 minutes. Who said we don’t have a minute to waste.

During the course of 47,304,000 minutes I’d say that some of those minutes could easily and guiltlessly be wasted. And that would also dispel the theory that there’s never enough time to do everything. During 47,304,000 minutes you could eat 5,000 tons of Wheaties and drink more than 20,000 pints of beer.

Time moves slowly for some, quickly for others. I would imagine if you’re serving sixty days in jail — or 1,440 hours — time might indeed pass very slowly. After all, how many times could you reread the Superman comic book you’ve been rationed?

And time can move very quickly if you’re having fun. If you’re sky diving from 20,000 feet up not only is your body hurtling through space at a breakneck pace but it would only seem like a minute from top to bottom.

Contrary to science fiction it hasn’t been proven yet that we can fool around with time. We have not yet found a way to time travel either backwards or forwards. We can’t predict the future. We even have difficulty learning from the past. Time is relentless though. A ninety-year old man may live 32,850 days but that’s chicken feed compared to the universe.

The planet earth is estimated to be billions of years old. What’s ninety years out of that total? And for all we know earth may be around another billion years — assuming we can survive a few more tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires, mudslides, avalanches, melting ice bergs, global warming — and several more late night talk show hosts.

So is life really short? Compared to what — algae? Grass? Ivory Soap? Everyone agrees that people will live considerably longer as time goes on. So will those 32,850 days that now make up ninety years evolve into 64,000 days? Only time will tell but time rarely tells us anything. Our generation is living considerably longer than our great grandfathers did. And that’s because our great grandmothers gave as good as they got.

But whatever happens after we find our eternal rest, there will still be 24 hours or 1,440 minutes to every day. Use it or lose it.

Art Stevens is a long-time columnist for the Sanibel-Captiva Islander. His tongue-in-cheek humor is always offered with a smile.