How long has it taken for you to live your life? 30 years? 40 years? 50 or more years? We measure our lives in years and yet a lifetime may seem like little more than a blink of an eye.

How long is that?

According to researchers, not very long.

The duration of a blink is on average 100–150 milliseconds… and between 100–400 ms according to the Harvard Database of Useful Biological Numbers.

That ain’t very long, folks.

My lifetime has gone by in the blink of an eye. Childhood, adulthood, marriage and children, various and sundry careers. Gone in the blink of an eye.

I started taking photos with a 35mm camera when I was in my early 20s. Over the next 30 years I took over 4,000 photos and stuffed them into a dozen photo albums.

Since then, the age of digital photography eliminated the need for expensive film, processing, and printing. In the last 20 years I took over 27,000 photos and they are stored on my phone.

Easy to view. Easy to share.

One of my projects was to chronicle my lifetime in photos. My parents and grandparents’ photos numbered in the hundreds and crossed multiple lifetimes. My 31,000 photos cover my lifetime and yet with all that documentation of a good life, it still went by in the blink of an eye.

Remember that the next time you blink.