“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it”
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca (from around 4 BCE to 65 CE), a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, playwright, and advisor to Emperor Nero.
ONE day, Galen, a paddy farmer, decided he’d live to seventy. Not because a doctor told him. Not because of good genes, clean living, or prayers offered. It was just because seventy sounded like the sort of age people reached if they didn’t do anything too heroic, too stupid, or too unlucky. A nice, sensible number. Round enough to feel fair. Grim enough to feel honest.
So, he found a round log, flattened one side, and turned it into a tally board. He nailed it to the left wall of his woodshed.
Below it, he hung his saw and axe, as if to make the point clear: in this shed, things were measured, chopped, and finished.
He started when he was thirty. If you’re doing the maths at home, that means forty marks. Forty years left. A neat little account.
At the end of the first year — his first New Year after starting this cheerful little initiative — he crossed out the fortieth mark.
Thirty-nine years left.
That was it. No ceremony. No speech. No “new year, new me”. Just a line through a mark, like cancelling a debt, except the debt was his life, and the lender never forgets.
I didn’t know any of this at the time, obviously. I was too young to be burdened with existential bookkeeping. I must’ve been three or four when he began, still at the age when your greatest fear is running out of sweets, not running out of time.
Galen told me about his lifespan tally years later, when I was old enough to hold a proper conversation — meaning, old enough to pretend I understood the world while secretly being terrified by it.
The first time I saw the log, five marks had already been crossed out.
Galen was stacking firewood, expression blank, movements steady. He glanced at the tally board and muttered, half to himself, half to the universe:
“Thirty-five more to go.”
I stared at him. He didn’t explain. I didn’t ask. I was a child, after all — roughly seven, I think. That age when you hear words, but they don’t always land.
That day, I was sent by my mother to borrow salt from Gelen. We’d run out because my father, in his endless commitment to forgetting crucial things, had neglected to buy it when he last went to the village provision shop. The village was several miles away from our paddy farm, reached by a rugged jungle path that seemed designed specifically to punish anyone who didn’t plan.
So off I went, small and obedient, to Galen’s place — salt mission in hand — like a tiny ambassador between households, unaware I was about to witness the most pessimistic home décor choice imaginable.
Galen gave me the salt without fuss. He always did things without fuss. Fuss was for people who believed the universe cared.
Time did what time does. It went on without asking permission.
Fast forward ten years.
I was seventeen and freshly finished with Form 5, having taken the Senior Cambridge Examination. While waiting for my results, I joined my family at the paddy farm again.
And not far from our fields, Galen’s woodshed still stood. By then, Galen was forty-five.
The thought came to me in a sudden, unpleasant way — like realising you’ve been walking with a stone in your shoe for miles.
Did he keep doing it?
Surely not. Surely this was a strange phase, like collecting stamps, except instead of stamps it was dread.
But Galen was not a man who did phases. He made decisions.
So, I went to see him.
He was there as always, looking as if he’d been carved out of the same stubborn wood he stacked. The shed door was open. The air smelt of timber and heat. And on the left wall, nailed in place like a verdict, was the log.
More marks crossed out now. A good many more.
He hadn’t stopped. Of course, he hadn’t.
He didn’t even seem to think it was odd. He treated it like a calendar you don’t bother hanging in the house because you already know what day it is: another one.
I stood there for a moment, staring at it, and felt something twist in my chest. Not fear exactly. Not grief either. More like … offence. As if the log was being rude. As if it had no right to be so blunt.
You hear people say life is short. You hear it the way you hear “eat your vegetables”, vaguely aware it’s probably true, but annoyed someone keeps bringing it up.
But here was Galen, literally carving it into wood and crossing it out year by year. No poetry. No denial. No comforting lies.
Just arithmetic.
It was disconcerting, to say the least. I’d never met anyone who actually counted down their days to the grave with such meticulous commitment. It felt like a dark joke told by someone who didn’t smile at punchlines.
My mind understood the logic. If you believe you have a limited number of years and want to keep track, you make a counter.
Simple.
But my heart — well, my heart was doing something else entirely. Something less tidy. Something like panic wearing a polite face.
“You’re still doing it,” I said, pointing at the log as if it were a household pet.
Galen glanced at it. Then back at me.
“Still alive,” he said. “Still crossing.”
That was Galen’s version of humour. Dry and blunt.
I tried to sound casual. “Doesn’t it bother you? Looking at it all the time?”
He shrugged, as if I’d asked whether mosquitoes were annoying.
“It’s there whether I look or not.”
A fair point. Horrible, but fair.
I stepped closer, reading the marks properly now. If he started at thirty with forty years, and he was forty-five now … that meant fifteen years gone, twenty-five remaining.
Twenty-five! A number that sounded like it belonged to someone’s plans. Like something you could spend. Like time was a currency and he’d decided not to pretend he was rich.
“What made you start?” I asked.
Galen leaned his axe against the wall and wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. His expression didn’t soften, but there was something in his eyes then — something tired, something old, even though he wasn’t.
“People waste life pretending it’s endless,” he said. “They talk about ‘someday’ like it’s a place you can visit. I wanted to see what I had.”
That should have sounded noble. It almost did. Except Galen said it the way someone talks about checking the weather before a storm: not to be brave, just to be prepared.
“And if you don’t reach seventy?” I asked because I couldn’t help myself. Teenagers love poking at the edges of things. It’s how we prove we’re alive.
He gave a small snort.
“Then I’ve overestimated,” he said, as if discussing a bad harvest. “Wouldn’t be my first mistake.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I wanted to argue. To tell him he shouldn’t speak like that, shouldn’t carve his own ending into a log like a prison sentence.
But then I realised something: he wasn’t doing it to punish himself.
He wasn’t sitting there crying into his tally marks. He wasn’t cursing fate. He wasn’t using the counter to become miserable.
He was using it to stay awake.
There’s a difference, as it turns out, between staring at death and being swallowed by it. Galen stared at it the way he stared at the paddy: not with romance, not with dread, but with the sober attention of someone who knows what neglect can cost.
He picked up another piece of firewood and fitted it into the stack with care.
“Besides,” he added, almost lazily, “it’s not all bad.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Counting down to your death isn’t all bad?”
He looked at me as if I’d missed the obvious.
“It means you’re counting something,” he said. “Most people don’t count. They just drift. At least I know when a year has gone. I don’t have to guess.”
It was such a bleak sort of wisdom that it almost circled back into being reassuring. Like being told, very calmly, that yes, the boat is leaking, but at least you’ve noticed.
I stayed a while longer. We talked about the farm, about the weather, about ordinary things — because ordinary things are what life is mostly made of. The big thoughts come in flashes, but paddy still needs planting.
When I finally left, I glanced back at the woodshed one more time. The log hung there on the wall, stubborn and patient.
It occurred to me that Galen’s counter wasn’t really about death at all.
Not the way I’d first thought, as a child. Not as a threat or a curse or a morbid hobby.
It was a reminder, sharp and unkind, that time moves whether you are ready or not. That life doesn’t pause while you find yourself. The jungle path to the village doesn’t get any shorter just because you’ve run out of salt.
And, strangely, that thought didn’t crush me.
It irritated me, yes. Like a truth that won’t let you rest. But it also steadied me. If time was going to march on with or without my approval, then I could at least choose how to walk alongside it.
Galen had twenty-five marks left, give or take fate’s sense of humour.
And I — well, I had no log. No neat row of lines to cross out. But as I headed back to the paddy fields, with the sun lowering and the frogs already starting their nightly conversations, I found myself thinking that maybe the point wasn’t to fear the countdown.
Maybe the point was simply to notice the days while they were still there.
Not in some grand, inspirational way — nothing so embarrassing.
Just in a practical way. Like remembering to buy the salt.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of the Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at www.hayhenlin@gmail.com
