A few weeks ago, I read a column by Virginia DeLuca. At sixty, her husband told her he wanted a divorce so he could have a child with a younger woman. As she wondered aloud about reentering the dating world at sixty, she dropped a line that made me laugh—and then stop. In essence, DeLuca stated, “… I had more past than future.” Her comment hit home. “Yes,” I whispered following along, “… there are more days behind than ahead.” DeLuca was spot on. It was funny. Classic. Clean. No melodrama. Just a raised eyebrow of truth. And once you hear a sentence like that, you can’t unhear it.

At a certain point in life, time stops feeling theoretical. It becomes visible. Finite. You’re not morbid about it. You’re just… honest. The future is no longer an open field; it’s a defined stretch of road. Still meaningful. Still real. But no longer infinite. I say all this because I’ve been waking up between 1:30 and 3:30 in the morning for years now. Not from anxiety, exactly. Not always from pain. Just awake. It’s the time when the mind is stripped of daytime defenses and the body refuses to lie. It’s also the period that time asks questions.

Stephen Jenkinson, in Die Wise, pressed readers with two deceptively simple ones:

  • How much time do I have left?
  • What is this time asking of me?

The first question is tempting. It’s measurable. Clinical. It feels responsible. But it rarely leads anywhere useful. The second question is harder—and far more unsettling—because it demands discernment rather than calculation. What is time asking of me? Not productivity. Not cheerfulness. Not proof of resilience.

It’s honesty.

For most of my life, endurance was the virtue. Be disciplined. Be responsible. Push through pain. Show up. Perform. Function. And to be fair, that approach worked—until it didn’t. Or until the cost of it quietly exceeds the benefit.

When there are more days behind than ahead, endurance alone feels incomplete. Time seems less interested in whether I can keep going, and more interested in how and why. Some nights, time seems to ask:

  • What can you stop carrying that you’ve already proven you can carry?
  • Where does your presence matter more than your performance?
  • What truths have you earned the right to say now?
  • What deserves your remaining mornings—not just your stamina?

When living with a long-term illness, questions in the form of five-year plans aren’t abundant. They come with pauses. With insomnia. With humor that’s a little dry and a little sharp. The kind of humor that says, Well… here we are.

There’s a strange relief in that honesty. Fewer days ahead doesn’t mean smaller days. If anything, it gives them more weight. Less tolerance for nonsense. Less interest in autopilot. Less patience for living someone else’s expectations. This isn’t about giving up. It’s about renegotiating the terms of engagement with time itself. So if I’m awake at 2 a.m., staring at the ceiling, I try not to ask how much longer this all goes on. I try to ask something better. What is time asking of me—right now?

Not an answer.
Just the willingness to listen.

A Spiritual Coda

Spiritually speaking, I no longer believe that time is asking me to hurry. Nor do I believe it is asking me to cling. If there is a sacred invitation in the season of dying, it may be this: to consent to reality as it is, without resentment and without illusion. To live fewer days with greater reverence. To bless what remains rather than bargain with it.

Many spiritual traditions say that wisdom arrives not when answers are found, but when better questions take root. Perhaps that is what God is asking of me now—not certainty, not control, but attention. A willingness to be fully present to what is still here, still offered. If there are more days behind me than ahead, then God is reminding me that each remaining day is no longer casual. It is consecrated by its limits.

And maybe that is enough. Maybe God is saying:

“No. I don’t have to conquer time.
No. I don’t need you to outrun it.
But I want you to meet me—awake, honest, and unafraid to listen.”