On Expiry Dates
The quiet mercy of the middle distance.
This week’s musing began in the most ordinary of places—the canned goods aisle of a supermarket—where a simple expiry date on a tin of beans sparked a sudden, sharp realisation about the labels we don’t carry. It is a reflection on the "middle distance" of life, that period where we begin to navigate the space our parents once occupied and settle into the reality of our own finitude. Following the passing of my father, I’ve been thinking often about the uncertainty of our own timelines; yet, as I explore in the essay below, perhaps there is a quiet mercy in not knowing our end. It is a meditation on why the absence of a stamped date isn’t a flaw of the human condition, but a tender invitation to live with a kind of gentle bravery in the richness of the middle.
There are moments in life that arrive so quietly that, if you weren’t paying attention, you might mistake them for nothing at all. They slip into the day like a faint change in the wind, or the soft click of a latch settling into place. They do not announce themselves as significant. They fail to shimmer or glow or ask to be remembered. They just appear, unbidden, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, and if you’re lucky — or perhaps simply not in a hurry — you notice them. Mine arrived in the supermarket, of all places, while I was standing in front of a shelf stacked with tins of baked beans. It was the kind of day that doesn’t belong to any particular season, the kind that drifts by without leaving a mark, absorbed into the long chain of errands and obligations that make up so much of adult life. The aisle was empty. The lighting was too bright. The air carried that faint metallic chill of refrigeration. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. I wasn’t searching for meaning. I was simply choosing beans.
And yet, even in that ordinariness, there was a faint sense of pause — the kind that sometimes settles over you when the world is quiet enough for your thoughts to catch up. Perhaps it was the stillness of the aisle, or the way the light fell across the tins, or simply the fact that I wasn’t rushing for once. Whatever the reason, something in me was open enough, or still enough, to notice what came next.
Because then I saw it — the expiry date.
Printed neatly on the metal. Clear. Unambiguous. A small, quiet truth on the lid. A tin of beans knows exactly how long it has. It knows when it will be considered “past its best.” It knows the boundaries of its usefulness. It knows the span of its life in a way we never do. There was something oddly comforting about that, something steadying, something almost enviable. A tin of beans has a certainty we lack. It has a place in time. It has a defined arc. It has an ending that is known in advance.
We don’t get that.
We move through our days without labels, without timelines, without any clear sense of how long we have. We live as though the road stretches on indefinitely, even though we know — in some quiet, unspoken way — that it doesn’t. We pretend permanence because the alternative is too heavy to carry in the front of the mind. And yet, as I stood there with a basket in my hand and a row of tins in front of me, I felt a small shift inside, the kind that doesn’t announce itself but settles in like a whisper. A recognition that I, too, am temporary — but without the courtesy of a date stamped on my lid.
It made me wonder, in that quiet, unhurried way that thoughts sometimes unfold when you’re not trying to think at all: what would we do differently if we knew our expiry date? Would we live more urgently, or more gently? Would we cling more tightly to the people we love, or would the knowledge make us fearful of the inevitable parting? Would we savour the ordinary moments, or would they feel like sand slipping through our fingers? Would we become wiser, or simply more anxious? And perhaps the most unsettling question of all: would knowing the end diminish the middle?
I suspect it would. I suspect the knowledge would be too heavy, too sharp, too defining. I suspect it would turn life into a countdown rather than a journey. We would measure instead of savour. We would calculate instead of live. We would look at the clock instead of the sky. The mystery, inconvenient as it is, is also a mercy. It allows us to live in the middle of things — to love without guarantees, to hope without a schedule, to find meaning in the fog rather than in the clarity of a countdown.
And yet, even as I say that, I can feel the countercurrent beneath it — the part of us that longs for certainty, that aches for something solid to hold on to. There is a deep human desire to know where we stand in the story. To know how many chapters remain. To know whether we are still in the rising action or already approaching the final pages. We want to orient ourselves. We want to understand the shape of our own narrative. And perhaps that longing is not foolish but tender — a sign that we care about the life we’re living, that we want to live it well, that we fear wasting what we cannot replenish.
But life, in its quiet wisdom, withholds that knowledge. It asks us to live without the map. It asks us to trust the path even when the horizon is hidden. It asks us to walk by feel, not by certainty. And perhaps that is the deeper invitation: not to know, but to notice. Not to predict, but to pay attention. Not to measure the length of our days, but to inhabit them.
Lately, I’ve felt the texture of time more keenly. Not as dread, and not as urgency, but as a subtle shift in the air — the way the light changes in late afternoon, signalling the approach of evening even before the sun begins to set. Some of that comes from watching the generation ahead of me fade. My father lived to eighty‑eight. A long life by any measure. A full one. And yet, when he died, it felt both expected and impossible. Expected, because age had been quietly gathering around him for years. Impossible, because he had always been there — a fixed point in the landscape of my life, a mountain that had always been on the horizon.
Now, at fifty‑six, I find myself doing the quiet maths no one teaches you how to do. Not to predict anything — life isn’t an equation — but to understand the shape of the road behind me and the mystery of the road ahead. It’s not morbid. It’s simply perspective. A soft awareness that I am no longer at the trailhead. There’s a moment in life — and it arrives differently for everyone — when you realise you’ve stepped into the same decade your parents once occupied in your memory. You start to see yourself not just as someone’s child, but as someone who is now the age, they were when you first understood what age meant. It’s a strange doubling of time, a quiet folding of past and present, a recognition that the horizon is no longer theoretical.
And in that recognition, something shifts. Not fear. Not panic. Just a gentle, steadying awareness: I am finite. And so is everyone I love. And strangely, that awareness doesn’t diminish life — it deepens it. It makes the ordinary moments feel more textured, more luminous, more worth noticing. It makes the small rituals — the morning cup of tea, the familiar walk, the quiet evening — feel like threads in a tapestry that is still being woven, even if we cannot see the full pattern.
But there is another layer to this middle distance, one that reveals itself only when you linger long enough to let the thought settle. It is the realisation that the middle is not a fixed point but a shifting one. We never quite know when we have crossed into it. We only recognise it in hindsight, when the landscape behind us has grown longer than the landscape ahead. And even then, the recognition is not sharp but soft — a kind of atmospheric change, like the way the air cools before dusk. You don’t see the sun lowering; you feel the light thinning.
This middle distance brings with it a new kind of attention. Not the restless attention of youth, which is always scanning the horizon for what might come next, but a steadier, more grounded attention — one that looks not outward but around. It is the attention of someone who has begun to understand that life is not a race toward a destination but a slow, unfolding conversation with time itself. And in that conversation, the questions change. They become quieter, more spacious, more tender.
What does it mean to live well when the horizon is no longer theoretical?
What does it mean to shape a life that honours its own finitude without being crushed by it?
What does it mean to carry the knowledge of impermanence not as a burden but as a lantern?
These questions do not demand answers. They simply ask to be held — gently, honestly, without rushing. They ask us to sit with the truth that life is not something we master but something we accompany. And perhaps that is the quiet wisdom of the middle distance: it teaches us to walk with time rather than against it, to let the days be what they are rather than what we wish they were, to recognise that the beauty of life lies not in its certainty but in its unfolding.
And as I sit with these thoughts, I realise that the middle distance is not a place of loss but a place of clarity. It is the point at which the noise begins to fall away, leaving behind only what matters — the people we love, the rituals that steady us, the moments that ask nothing of us except our presence. It is the point at which we begin to understand that life is not measured in years but in attention. And perhaps that is the quiet gift of this stage of life: it invites us to pay attention in a way we never have before.
The baked‑beans moment stayed with me longer than I expected. It followed me out of the supermarket, into the car, through the evening, and into the next day. Not as a heavy thought, but as a quiet companion. A reminder that life is made of moments like that — small, ordinary, easily overlooked — and that meaning often arrives through the side door. It made me wonder how many moments like that I’ve missed. How many small truths have slipped past me because I was rushing, or distracted, or convinced that meaning only arrives in grand, cinematic ways. We spend so much of our lives waiting for the big moments — the milestones, the turning points, the revelations — that we forget how much of life happens in the spaces between them. In the aisles of supermarkets. In the pauses between conversations. In the quiet rituals of ordinary days.
Perhaps that’s why the absence of an expiry date matters. It forces us to pay attention. To notice the texture of the present. To recognise that the ordinary is not a backdrop to life — it is life. And perhaps that is the quiet wisdom hidden inside that small stamped date: that certainty is not what gives life meaning. Uncertainty is. Our ability to live is permitted by not knowing. The not‑knowing is what gives life its texture. The not‑knowing is what makes the present moment precious.
There is a particular kind of courage required to live without knowing how long we have. Not the dramatic courage of heroes or legends. Not the kind that earns applause. But a quieter, steadier courage — the courage to wake up each day and live it fully, knowing it could be one of many or one of few. The courage to love people, knowing they are temporary. The courage to build a life in a world where everything is passing through. The courage to hope without guarantees. We don’t talk about this much. Perhaps because it feels too obvious. Perhaps because it feels too tender. Perhaps because naming it makes it real. But I think there’s value in acknowledging it, in saying aloud what hums beneath the surface of our days: we are finite. We are temporary. We are unlabelled. And that is both the ache and the beauty of being human.
Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if we did have expiry dates. If we could turn our wrists or tilt our heads and see the number stamped there. Would it make us wiser? Kinder? More present? Or would it trap us in a kind of existential arithmetic? Instead of living, would we spend our days counting down? Would we become more grateful — or more afraid? Would we cherish the ordinary or resent it? I suspect the knowledge would be too heavy. I suspect it would crush the spontaneity out of life. I suspect it would make us cling too tightly or detach too quickly. The not‑knowing is what allows us to live.
When I think about my father now, I don’t think about the number eighty‑eight. I think about the way he lived in the middle of things. The way he moved through his days with a kind of quiet steadiness. The way he found meaning in the ordinary — in routines, in rituals, in the small acts of care that accumulate into a life. He didn’t know his expiry date. But he lived as though the present mattered. And perhaps that is the only wisdom we ever really need.
As I write this, the baked beans moment feels less like an odd supermarket thought and more like a small doorway into something larger. A reminder that meaning doesn’t always arrive in grand gestures. Sometimes it arrives in the quiet recognition that we are temporary — and that this temporariness is what makes life tender. We don’t have expiry dates. We don’t know how long we have. But we have this moment. Following that comes the next one. And then the next. And if we can meet each one with presence — with attention, with care, with a willingness to be fully here — then perhaps that is enough. Perhaps that is the quiet purpose of a life without a label: to live not by the certainty of an ending, but by the richness of the middle.
And perhaps — and this is a thought that has only recently begun to settle in me — perhaps the absence of an expiry date is not just a mercy but an invitation. An invitation to live with a kind of gentle bravery. To hold our days not as possessions but as gifts. To treat the people we love not as fixtures but as wonders. To recognise that the fragility of life is not a flaw but a feature — the very thing that makes it precious.
And in the end, maybe all we can do — all any of us can do — is try to leave a little warmth behind us. A little kindness. A little light. Something that lingers after we’ve gone, even if we never knew when that would be. And perhaps that’s enough. Perhaps it always has been.
Until next time