The Box
There are five of us in a rental car heading from the airport to the hotel. A friend is talking about a book. Nikki Erlick’s The Measure. The premise is simple: one morning, everyone on Earth wakes up to find a small wooden box on their doorstep. Inside is a string. The length of the string is the length of your remaining life.
The question the novel asks is the obvious one. Do you open it?
I didn’t expect that question to follow me around for the rest of the day. But it did.
I started asking people. In the car, in the hotel lobby after we arrived. If you had the box, would you open it?
Almost everyone said no. The reasons varied, but the conviction was consistent. People don’t want to know when they’re going to die. That much was clear.
What wasn’t clear, at least not to me, was why I couldn’t land on an answer. Everyone around me seemed sure. I wasn’t. I scribbled a thought card right there in the hotel lobby, mid-conversation, and wrote four lines:
If given a finite date of end of life, when would you choose to know the date/time? What is the butterfly effect? Is it selfish, your decision? I’m quite mixed and conflicted.
Four questions. No answers. That bothered me.
Two Reasons and a Third
Three camps emerged, and they weren’t saying the same thing.
The first came from faith. One friend put it best. God gives us free will to choose Him, and that involves walking our path and finding Him on our own. The seeking is the point. If you open the box and see thirty more years, faith becomes time management. If you see three years, every prayer gets contaminated by urgency. You’re not seeking God freely anymore. You’re responding to a deadline. His argument is that faith requires uncertainty to be faith at all. Remove the uncertainty and you haven’t gained knowledge. You’ve lost the only context in which genuine seeking is possible.
The second was pragmatic, and I was in it. I didn’t trust myself with the information. Knowing would change how I showed up, how I planned, how I treated people. I’d rather not risk it. Others in this group said the same thing in different words.
The third camp surprised me. Another friend said he’d open it. Not out of curiosity or ego. He wanted the information so he could live differently, pour into the things that actually matter. For him, the box wasn’t a threat. It was a tool. Knowing the timeline would sharpen his priorities, not paralyze them.
I kept turning these three positions over. The faith camp had something solid underneath it. The open-it position had a clarity I respected. But my own camp? I couldn’t quite articulate why it felt shaky. All I knew was that I was mixed and conflicted, and I couldn’t land.
Later that afternoon, still processing the conversation, a harder thought surfaced. Maybe my position wasn’t as sturdy as it sounded. I was saying “it would mess me up,” but I might have been saying more than I meant to. I wasn’t choosing peace. I was choosing to avoid the accountability that comes with knowing. If you know your timeline, you can’t waste a Tuesday anymore. You can’t coast through a week and promise yourself you’ll do better next time. The box removes the comfortable fiction that there’s always more time.
Maybe not opening the box, for me, wasn’t wisdom. It might have been avoidance dressed up as wisdom.
The Butterfly Effect
The car conversation didn’t end at the hotel. It kept going in the lobby, with friends drifting in and out. That’s where the friend who’d argued from faith asked me the question that cracked this open further. If you knew, what’s the one thing you’d repair or go back and change?
I didn’t have to think long. I’d pour more time into my wife and my daughter and less into everything else.
That answer felt honest in the moment. It also felt like a confession. Because I was saying it in a hotel lobby, away from them for the next three days, at an industry conference.
But here’s what I didn’t see at first. The butterfly effect I wrote about on my thought card wasn’t hypothetical. I was watching it happen in real time. A friend recommended a book in a rental car. That turned into a question I couldn’t stop asking. The question followed me into the lobby, where one friend added a theological layer and another challenged the whole premise by saying he’d open it. That turned into a thought card I scribbled mid-conversation. The thought card turned into this essay. A single book recommendation reshaped my entire day, and every conversation along the way added something the last one didn’t have.
The Woods
The day before I left for the conference, I took my daughter hiking at a park near our house. She’s three and a half. We started on the paved path, and then she wanted to go into the woods. So we went. Her mom was there but stayed on the trail. My daughter and I climbed over fallen trees, poked at things, explored.
It was one of those moments you don’t plan. You just say yes.
From my hotel room the next day, she sent me a text. Voice-to-text, dictated by a three-year-old, so the transcription was a mess. But the parts that came through were clear enough:
“Don’t cry, daddy. I miss you so much. Make sure you go to bed. Eat good and use your manners. I love you when you’re home.”
She’s parenting me. She’s echoing back the things her mom and I say to her every night. Go to bed. Eat good. Use your manners. That’s what love sounds like to her, because that’s what we’ve taught her love sounds like.
And then she told me she can’t wait to go hiking again.
She isn’t counting the days I’m away at a conference. She’s holding onto the last time I went into the woods with her. She’s not counting hours with me. She’s counting adventures.
The butterfly effect of that hike isn’t the afternoon itself. It’s that I’m raising a kid who goes off the paved path. Every time I say yes to the woods, I’m shaping who she becomes. And she’s already shaping who I become. Her text did more to answer my thought card than every lobby conversation combined.
The Letter
When the conversation turned to whether I’d open the box, my real hesitation surprised me. It wasn’t about the length of the string. It was about what saying it out loud would cost me.
If I say out loud “I live with intentionality,” I’ve created a standard. Every time I fall short of it, I’m not just having a bad week. I’m failing something I claimed to believe. Status quo doesn’t judge you. Status quo lets you be pretty good most of the time without ever asking if pretty good is enough.
That fear has a history. I spent a lot of years, as a kid and a young adult, feeling like I wasn’t enough for my dad. Not being good enough was familiar territory. Setting a standard and falling short of it wasn’t a hypothetical. It was a lived experience.
In my late twenties, I went through counseling that helped me name it. I ended up writing my dad a letter. Not a blame letter. I started with what I knew I’d done to hurt him, and then I explained how some of what he’d done had hurt me and how it made me feel. My mom told me later it had a profound impact on him.
Before that letter, I only called to talk to my mom. After it, I started intentionally alternating. I call, I talk to one of them, I say goodbye so the other one has to share separately. It’s a small thing. But it’s deliberate. It’s a choice I make every time.
I didn’t see it until this afternoon. I’m afraid of declaring a standard and falling short. But I already survived it. I already opened that box. I looked at a broken relationship, measured it honestly, named what was wrong on both sides, and chose to build something different. Not once. Every phone call. The relationship with my dad isn’t perfect. But it’s not wedged anymore.
I’ve already proven I can open the box and live with what’s inside.
The Measure
I started the day undecided. Would I open it or not?
I’m ending it somewhere I didn’t expect. The answer isn’t yes or no. The question itself is the gift, but only if it changes how you live after you hear it. The people in the novel who open their boxes and the people who don’t are both changed by the existence of the box. You can’t un-know it’s there. You can’t un-ask the question.
I leave work at 5:15 most nights. I’m home by 5:30. My phone goes away. I’m fully present with my daughter until she goes to bed at 7. That’s an hour and a half. Some nights it’s the paved path. Some nights it’s the woods.
The measure that matters isn’t the length of the string. It’s whether you’re living like you already opened it.
I think I am. I’m not putting a question mark on that anymore.
What’s the box you haven’t opened yet?