John Keats, Emily Bronte, Alexander the Great Mozart, Sylvia Plath, Van Gogh In the Death of Jericho, the brilliant romantic artist who a few years before had one international renowned for his raft of the Medusa is shown stretched out on his bed in his Parisian studio in the greedy Matia, having just succumbed to a tie Ford infection developed after a riding accident.

He waas 33.

Yes, old, given the extent of their contributions, it seems appalling how young these talents died.

But when we zero in on the oft remarked detail that they seem to have achieved MAWR in a few brief years than many of us achieve in eight decades, a new thought opens up.

The very discrepancy between us and them suggests that we are perhaps being overly blunt when we choose to measure life span in a unitary way without reference toe.

What someone happens to be doing with the years that they've bean allotted a year in the hands of a person who is open to experience, who creates, feels, loves, connects and delights is a lot denser.

And in that way therefore, longer than exactly the same amount of time in the hands of a less responsive and less inwardly generous human being.

We might go so far as to propose that a year in the life of the former should be given a different numerical weight than one in the latter.

That a year in the life off, say, Jericho or Emily Bronte should not be counted in exactly the same way as a year for someone else and might more rightly be doubled or more.

We know in travel that two days in a particularly vibrant city can feel like a year in another, less inspired place, and the same is true of life.

More broadly, not everyone who is living is equally alive.

Just as we calculate dog years to take animal size and anatomy into account so we might recalibrate life span according to the depths of meaning, one has plumbed, not the gross years that one is breathed, adjusted for the intensity of experience.

We might hence judge that whatever basic chronology might claim, Mozart really died at around 120 years old, and Sylvia Plath at 80 and Jericho in his mid seventies.

All this matters immensely because our sadness that the idea of death frequently reduces itself to the thought that our lives might not be, as we put it long enough.

But we shouldn't measure life by the hours it contains, rather by the wisdom, love and intelligence with which these hours have been spent by which school many of the people most legendary for having had brief lives really had nothing of the sort.

It doesn't matter in this.

If we have no genius level capacities at poetry or painting, it still remains for us to choose how purposefully and beautifully and therefore, ultimately, how long we can live.

We should not stay transfixed or devastated by the simple number of days liable to be ahead of us.

We should concentrate on how to Sprinkle them with meaning.

In the novel The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, there's a powerful death scene.

Theo, elderly Fabrizio, called bearer prince of Salina, who is the psychological center of the book, is about to die.

He's lying in bed with his weeping relatives around him, and he asks himself that terrifying, fundamental question.

How much of my life have I actually lived.

The answer is deeply disturbing.

He can pick out a few months here and there, two weeks before his wedding, two weeks after a few days around the birth of his first son, certain hours he spent in his observatory.

He's a distinguished astronomer, a few hours of flirtation here and there, times when he was reading aloud to his Children conversations with one or two friends, particularly his nephew, but not much in total, perhaps a year or two out of 70.

If we measure the reality of our lives by the quantity of time we have passed in a state of genuine happiness, the answer may be distressing, but it might be the right way of sizing up the length of a life.

We should become far more focused on how well we live rather than the absolute number of days we're going to exist.

We're not, in the end, ever really very short of time.

What we're truly short off is affection, open heartedness, kindness.

Tolerance was short of the ability to create peak experiences in which we are sufficiently unf Wrighton, approachable and responsive.

We may have a lot to mourn, but it isn't necessarily the imminence off death, It may more be the difficulty of living with courage and sensitivity.

The challenge of our lives is to learn to live deeply rather than extensively.

The artist John Isaacs depicts a ravaged corpse in a gallery.

It's stomach hangs out.

Its rib cage appears to be in hacked at like a butcher's carcass.

But the real horror and rebuke lies in the title of the work.

Are You Still Mad at Me?

The tone is calculatedly banal next to the ghoulish fate that has befalling what we take to be someone's erstwhile partner.

The poor corpse before us might only a little while ago have spent their time in an apartment squabbling with their loved one, asserting their point of view, not forgiving, not being able to move on shore.

They were right, but not being able to see things through another's eyes.

And now their Pettiness is being judged from the perspective of death.

Are we really going to spend the only lives will ever know in yet another argument about who disrespected whom, when outside the narrow Kazen of our embittered relationships, so many opportunities for joy and wonder remain a week and a walk towards death without properly filling our lungs with the beauty of existence.

We aren't here being warned that we're gonna die.

That's eminently survivable.

Is a thought were being worn of a farm or appalling but less often mentioned danger that we might die in the midst of a sulk about no very much at all.

None of us can command how long live, but it is very much in our remit to try to adjust how colorfully and how deeply we're going to live.

We may have to rethink what a premature death actually is.

It isn't necessarily what happens to a young artist who's gone by 30.

He or she may, in a fair assessment, have bean a non imaginary in or more.

It's we who might right now, even if we are well past middle age, be heading for a regrettably early death.

So our goal shouldn't be to lay claim to yet more decades.

It is to ensure that we do everything in the days ahead to learn the art of appreciation.

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