Psalm 90:12

Notice what Moses does not pray for. He does not ask for more days, or easier ones. He asks to be taught to count the days he already has. It is a strangely practical request, and a humbling one, because most of us live as though the supply were endless. We spend an afternoon the way a rich man spends loose change — barely noticing it go, certain there is plenty more where that came from. And there is, until suddenly there is not. Wisdom, Moses suggests, begins the moment we actually feel the arithmetic: that a life is not an abstraction but a finite stack of ordinary days, that the stack is numbered, and that how we spend one is not separate from how we spend the whole. This is not meant to frighten us into frantic productivity, or to darken every good hour with the shadow of its ending. It is meant to clarify. When you know the days are counted, you hold them differently — slower to waste them on grievances that will not matter, quicker to say the thing that does, more willing to be present in the hour you are actually in rather than the one you are worried about. To number our days is not morbid. It is the beginning of a heart of wisdom, because only someone who knows a day is precious will trouble to spend it well.

Dillard states the psalm's arithmetic plainly. There is no separate account marked “my life” — it is only ever the sum of the ordinary days, which is exactly why learning to number them is learning to live.