You will be dead much longer than you will be tired, the Sunday arithmetic

By Horace Palacio:

A line has been circulating this week, dressed in the name of Alexander the Great.

You will be dead much longer than you will be tired.

Did Alexander actually say it? Honesty first, as always in this column. No ancient historian records the sentence, and it carries the fingerprints of the internet, which loves to lend its best lines to famous corpses. But for once, the internet mailed the quote to the correct address. Because whether or not the words are his, no life in recorded history argues them harder.

Consider the record. A young man inherits a small kingdom at twenty. By thirty two he has marched an army more than twenty thousand miles, from Greece to the edge of India, never once losing a battle, founding cities from Egypt to Afghanistan that carry his name to this day. He fought at the front, not the rear. At one siege in India an arrow went through his chest into his lung, and the man got up and kept campaigning. Plutarch records that Alexander said it was sleep that reminded him he was mortal. Tiredness, to him, was weather. You do not negotiate with weather. You march through it.

Now sit with the sentence itself, because it is really a piece of arithmetic, and arithmetic is this column’s love language.

How long will you be tired? Tonight, perhaps. This season, maybe. Tiredness is a visitor. It arrives, it sits heavily, and it always, always leaves, usually by morning, sometimes by Monday, occasionally by next year.

How long will you be dead? Forever. Not a long time. Forever. Every year that has ever passed and every year that will ever come, stacked end to end, and then eternity after that. Death is not a visitor. Death is the address.

So the sentence is simply asking you to compare the two durations before you make any permanent decision based on the temporary one. And yet, look around Belize, and listen to the national anthem we actually sing daily. Mi tired.

Let me be careful here, because this column has spent a year honoring Belizean tiredness, and I will not insult it now. The mother working the hotel shift and the market stall, whose month is longer than her money, she is not the target of this sermon. She is its proof. She wakes exhausted every single morning and rises anyway. She has been living Alexander’s arithmetic her whole life without a meme to tell her so. Salute her.

No, the sentence aims at something else entirely. It aims at the dreams we execute with fatigue as the weapon. The business never registered, because mi tired. The course abandoned at module three. The field never planted. The application never sent. The apology never made, the book never opened, the savings circle never started. Ask the honest question, Belize. How many of our unlived lives were cancelled not by failure, not by enemies, not by lack of talent, but by a feeling that would have passed by Thursday?

We keep signing permanent resignations with temporary ink.

Now, the double edge, because this column never sells half a story, and Alexander’s own life carries the correction inside it.

Two facts about the undefeated general. First, the only force that ever beat him was tiredness itself, just not his own. At a river in India called the Hyphasis, his soldiers, eight years and twenty thousand miles from home, refused to take another step. The man who had conquered the known world stood before his own exhausted army, and lost. The mutiny of the weary turned him around. And second, he was dead at thirty two, burned through, feverish in Babylon, a torch that consumed itself entirely.

So hold both truths, because together they make the whole lesson. Tiredness must never cancel your purpose. And unmanaged fire consumes the torch. The sentence was never an instruction to skip sleep. Even Alexander slept, he simply never stopped. The instruction is finer than that. Rest, fully, nightly, guiltlessly, and never once resign. Rest is a pit stop. Quitting is a destination. The tragedy is not the Belizean who takes Sunday off. The tragedy is the one who mistook a Sunday feeling for a final answer.

Which gives us the practical tool, in the tradition of this column’s tests. Call it the tired-or-done test, and run it any night the towel feels ready to be thrown. Ask one question. Am I tired, or am I done? Tired needs a bed. Done needs a decision. And here is the iron rule that comes with the test. Decisions are never to be signed by fatigue. Never quit at night. Sleep first, and let the morning cast the deciding vote, because the morning has never once agreed with midnight.

And remember the ledger this column opened months ago, the one about your forty seconds on the radio. In the grave, understand, you will finally receive every hour of rest you ever skipped, refunded in full, with interest, and eternity added. Death is scrupulously fair about rest. It repays all of it. What death never refunds, not one, is a chance. The naps come back. The openings do not.

One last widening of the lens, because you know this column never leaves the nation out. Belize itself is tired. Tired of blackouts, tired of prices, tired of the same arguments in new jerseys. Fine. A tired country is entitled to sigh. It is not entitled to resign. Everything on this year’s blueprint, the scorecards, the megawatts, the classrooms, the ledgers, waits on the far side of a nation that decides its exhaustion is a visitor and not an address.

So here is your Sunday arithmetic, Belize, whoever first did the math.

Tonight, you will be tired for perhaps eight hours.

You will be dead for the rest of eternity, and eternity keeps no office hours and grants no appeals.

The tomb has already reserved your eternal rest, fully paid, no booking required.

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