120 Years

It seems I'm all caught up with myself.  It only seems, but it's a start.



           I had kind of a fun idea more than two decades back about the natural human life span.  I calculated, based on rates I had observed of growth and decay of both muscle and maturity over roughly twenty years, that it would be, on average, 120 years.

          Now, this life span, which would account not only for the mean lifespan of everyone on earth, but also for the median and the mode, could only be experienced in a harmonious version of humanity, in the absence of any counteractive forces which currently seem to exist in the world.  Forces like Fear, and everything derived from it.  There would be outliers, of course, this would still be a natural world, physical; a world composed in equal parts creative and destructive influences.  Otherwise, why bother with mortality at all.  In a static and sterile reality one does not live and die.  One chooses either to exist or to not.  But I'm getting of track.  What I had derived all those years ago, still very much a child, was that almost every person on the planet would live between 114 and 128 years.  To be exact, it would be 3SD on the normal Bell, or approximately ninety-eight percent.

          What's neat is that the lifespan would naturally separate into four seasons:  Youth, Middle-age, Old-age, and Elder.  Each would consist of 30 years, give or take, mostly based on personality and temperament, but also to a lesser degree on circumstance.  These phases of mortality would be just as they are here in our experienced world, only that their durations and passings away, wouldn't be unknown and guessed at.  They would be, more or less, predictable.

          Thirty years of cool, thirty of hot, 30 of crisp, and one last measure of cold.  Neat.  I extended my Youth by roughly ten years, so I'll have to even out down the road and shorten a set.  I wonder which one I'll choose.  Which one would you choose?