No, I’m not writing about that impossible art of accepting the loss of one’s powers of movement, hearing, seeing, sexing, remembering, calculating or reasoning. Rather, I am writing about how our perception of time changes. In childhood, a year feels like infinity while in later life it feels increasingly shorter.
To accept this fact of life, a new time unit is needed which I have termed the Grace. A grace is a measure of time reflecting the opportunity for (spiritual) development, which occurs simultaneously with the growth and decline of the biological organism. Originally, I just used values between 0 and 9 to reflect this development. However, because people are used to dealing with chronological years, many people will want to use decaGraces to measure their spiritual age. It requires a simple calculation: multiply the Grace number by 10. DecaGraces are used in the table below.
As in school, aging is not the equivalent of being more spiritual or smarter. People reach a plateau that limits their intellectual, physical and spiritual development. Just as there are absolute physical limits to how fast a person can run, how many kilos a person can lift, there are also limits to how much spirituality a person can acquire in a world dominated by physical needs.
| decaGrace | Age at Start (years) | Duration (years) | Age at End (years) | Event |
| 0 | 0 | Conception | ||
| 10 | 0 | 0.25 | 0.25 | |
| 20 | 0.25 | 0.5 | 0.75 | Birth |
| 30 | Birth | 1 year | 1 year old | |
| 40 | 1 year old | 2 years | 3 years old | |
| 50 | 3 years old | 4 years | 7 years old | |
| 60 | 7 years old | 8 years | 15 years old | |
| 70 | 15 years old | 16 years | 31 years old | |
| 80 | 31 years old | 32 years | 63 years old | |
| 90 | 63 years old | 64 years | 127 years old |