The day, if you think about it, is the basic measurement of life, the milepost on the highway. We say “how’s your day going” or “how was your day.” Only if we’re spending a ridiculous amount of time with someone do we say, ‘how was your afternoon.’ And we never say ‘how was your hour.’

No, it’s the day, sandwiched neatly between the slow stupor of waking up and the gentle resignation of going to sleep. Each day we wake up and we rub sleep out of our eyes and we urinate and we brush the smell of lazy night out of our mouths and we pass gas and we cover our naked bodies with clothes and then we’re ready … for something, for anything.

And each day we laugh and smile and sigh and get frustrated. We dream, we desire, we give up, and we laugh about it all … years later, over drinks with new friends, and with old friends. Each day we meet someone new, whether we realize it or not. And those people we met years ago – or weeks ago – slip through our fingers, whether we realize it or not.

Each day we see something new. Or we see something old from a new perspective. And, sometimes, when that happens, we point it out to the person beside us. And, sometimes, we’re alone.

Then there is the moment.

The day is imposed on us as the blazing, exploding, gaseous sun screams across the cosmos and our own tiny blue and brown ball of land and water spins around. Compared to those awesome astronomic movements and forces and tilted axes, we are nothing and we must submit.

But the moment is our own creation. When we say it was a beautiful moment, it’s because we created it. Here is what the OED says of the moment:

moment |ˈmōmənt|
noun
1 a very brief period of time : she was silent for a moment before replying | a few moments later he returned to the office.

But I have a different definition. The moment is the measurement of time in which we sustain a single emotion. If we are angry and we stay angry for 15 minutes, then that is a moment. If we’re walking on a sidewalk and it’s October and the yellow and read and orange leaf of a tree falls slowly and softly and perfectly down to our toes and we smile, that is a moment.

We think about that moment for a minute, for two minutes, for five minutes maybe, and then it’s time for a new moment. I wish I knew how many moments make up a day, but I don’t think there’s a formula. It depends on our personalities, our moods, our surroundings. Does the fast pace of contemporary life mean that we have more moments each day than our grandparents did when they were our age? If every email we receive, every instant message, every text message, every song on the radio has the potential to evoke some emotion, are we constantly changing how we feel every minute of every hour of every day?

I would like to propose, as a hypothesis, that each day is comprised of 173 moments.

As far as I know, scientists aren’t entirely sure why we sleep. I mean … we sleep because we get tired. But why do we get tired? Why do our lives seem so neatly divided between opening our eyes at 8 in the morning and closing them at 11 at night? Why do we ask people ‘how was your day?’

And why do we lie when we respond and say good, or bad, or pretty good, or really great?

I turned 27 yesterday. It was low-key. I had raspberry sorbet with oreo cookies mixed in.

On our birthday, or the day after, we ask ourselves, how was the year? Have I grown as a person? Am I wiser? Am I enjoying myself? Am I following my dreams? Am I caring for the people I love?

According to my calculator and my hypothesis, I had 63,145 moments this past year. I’m assuming a good portion of them were spent in front of my computer as emails came in and got sent out and web pages were read and videos were watched. There were other moments: laying on the couch with Mari, running around the lake at sunset, arriving in Delhi without my luggage, yelling at a car that drifted into the bike lane.

And tens of thousands of other moments; some of them preserved with digital cameras, some of them preserved here on this blog, and some of them gone forever.

I can pull out 100 moments out of 63,145 and I can tell you it was the best year of my life, the best year that anyone has ever had in any life. I can pull out 100 others and tell you the exact opposite.

It seems unfair: that life has so many moments.

It makes it impossible to describe.

Life becomes whatever we decide to make of it.

But then, maybe that’s what makes it bearable.