Each day Troy writes the number of days remaining until he turns eighty on his hand, as a reminder to make the most of every one of them. I tried it. Turns out writing a fresh but ever-decreasing number on your hand each morning and noticing it fade with the day is a meditative act. Troy’s use of the age eighty was arbitrary — instead I used the Stats NZ calculator to find my average life expectancy, then worked out the number of days from there. Today I wrote the number 10574 on my hand. Which to me seems plenty.
