bhaskar saikia

We often measure our lives in years—birthdays, milestones, anniversaries, the slow turning of the calendar. But lately, I’ve begun to feel that years are a misleading unit. A year can pass without leaving a single imprint on the soul, while a single day of genuine excitement can change the entire course of who we are.

So I started thinking in a different way.
What if life is not measured by the days we exist, but by the days we feel alive?

Just add up the number of days you were excited in life, and you’ll find the number of days you actually lived.
Everything else is just the sum of days that slipped through your fingers unnoticed—days that were endured, not experienced. Days that belonged more to habit than to the heart.

This isn’t a mathematical formula. It’s a quiet reminder.
A reminder that excitement is not a luxury; it’s a sign of presence. It’s proof that something within you is awake—curious, hopeful, responsive. Excitement doesn’t have to be fireworks. It can be the gentle anticipation of a morning walk, the spark of starting a new idea, or even the soft throb of gratitude for a moment that feels right.

When you look back, it won’t be the dates you remember—it will be the days that made your pulse shift.

The rest?
They’re not exactly wasted, but they weren’t lived either. They’re the background noise, the scaffolding, the intervals between moments that matter. But if those intervals stretch too long, we begin to feel like we are surviving our days instead of inhabiting them.

So maybe the question we should ask ourselves is simple:
How many days have I truly lived so far—and how many do I want to live from here on?

If the number feels small, that’s not a verdict. It’s an invitation.

An invitation to seek out wonder, to pursue what brings a flutter to your chest, to say yes to adventures, to quietly build a life where excitement isn’t rare but woven into the everyday.

In the end, life is not as long as we think.
But it can be as deep, as vivid, and as alive as we dare to make it.