Do you know when I feel especially mortal? When I am most reminded that life is short and our place in the world is very temporary?
When I need to refill our stapler.
Today – I needed to refill our stapler. I went to the little drawer where we keep our staples and realized we have thee regular sized boxes of staples and one small box that came with my bright green mini-stapler.
Sixteen thousand staples. (Minus the hundred or two we we’ve used over the years.)
I’ll round down and say we have 15,000 staples. I can’t think of another item in my house that I have 15,000 of.
Matt and I probably staple, oh, say, three things a month. And, that might be generous for some months.
15,000 ÷ 3 = 5,000 months’ worth of staples
5,000 months ÷ 12 = 416 years.
Four hundred and sixteen years’ worth of staples.
There is no denying it – unless we really step-up our stapling game – our staples are going to outlast us.