I labored over this sentence today to a friend on IM:
The importance of anything in your life is only tangentially related to your perception of its importance–the true importance lies in the time you devote, whether directly or indirectly, proportional to your devotion to all the other things in your life.
Overall I only spent about 5 minutes writing the sentence, or 1/12th of an hour, or 1/288th of a day… or 1/105120th of a year. In contrast, I probably spend 1/4th of my day sleeping, (6 hours on average?). So the sentence was less than 1/70th as important as sleep is to me. This makes for some other interesting comparisons.. for example, sleep is about six times more important to me than a task at work that takes me one hour to complete. On the other hand, being at work (not necessarily working, as the case may be) is about 1 and 1/3rd more important to me than sleep.
I should have titled this entry: ‘fractions of importance’, or ‘a lesson in fractional importance’, or ‘the importance of applied rudimentary math’, or perhaps ‘why aren’t I important to you… anymore?’.
you are important to me.