I recently had a conversation with someone who told me they love the fact that there are questions we don’t know the answer to.

Funny thing is, every time I encounter a new corner of mathematics, or a new corner of anything really, I get this feeling of excited dread. The oh no, this is really cool and amazing feeling, immediately followed by I will never have enough time for all of this. 

Manifolds, the Poincaré conjecture, topology and hyperbolic geometry.. all those topics just sitting there being beautiful and enormous and completely unexplored by me. And that’s just mathematics, don’t get me started on everything else.

I keep coming back to Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks. The central provocation is simple: you’ll never get to the bottom of your to-do list purely because human life and time is finite. The sooner you stop pretending otherwise, the sooner you can actually live.

I’d like to say that I understand the concept of facing finitude intellectually, and yet, there’s something about standing at the entrance to a field you’ll never fully explore that feels like grief. All the questions you’ll never ask. All the paths you’ll never take. The versions of yourself who became a mathematician, a philosopher, a novelist, living in parallel branches you’ll never visit. You catch a glimpse of them sometimes, in a conversation that goes somewhere unexpected, and then they’re gone. I’m not going to pretend the loss isn’t real. 

Having said that, if one did have infinite time, no choice would mean anything. The weight of a decision comes precisely from what you’re giving up to make it. A life with no constraints would have no texture, no stakes, no reason to care about any one thing over another. The finitude might actually be the source of meaning instead of the enemy of it. The liberation is not that I’ve accepted my mortality and now feel free, but more like this particular thing won’t last forever, I am actually here for it in a way I couldn’t be otherwise. There are people you’ll never properly know just because there aren’t enough hours in a life to fully know more than a handful of people. There are places you’ll never go, conversations you’ll never have, versions of your own life you’ll never live. You make a choice and a thousand other choices close behind you because that’s just what living is.

Speaking of things ending, a sunset is beautiful partly because it ends. A conversation matters more when you know it won’t last forever. A first time is what it is precisely because there’s only one. It’s concentrating the meaning into the thing that’s actually happening, right now, instead of spreading it thin across an infinite number of things that might happen someday. There’s something about knowing something is finite that makes presence possible in a way it otherwise isn’t. When you know you can’t keep something forever, you actually show up for it. You stop half-living it while thinking about the next thing. The ending is what pulls you into the present moment and keeps you there.

That still doesn’t make the ache go away. I still feel it every time a new door opens and I realise I’ll probably never walk through it properly. But maybe that ache is just what caring feels like. Maybe you’re only capable of feeling it because things matter to you, and things mattering to you is not a problem to be solved. Maybe not everything requires your absolute best, and sometimes good enough is genuinely good enough.

As with most things, the one phrase that seems to bypass the temporary existential dread is one I keep borrowing from someone wiser than me.

I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

---