“People commonly assume that each passing second brings them closer to death; but this is largely and dangerously fallacious. The second in which a drowning man grabs hold of a life preserver or a starving man is offered a bowl of soup does not bring either closer to death but, rather, sharply away from it. People who undergo healthy conversions of habit cut abruptly away from death; wholesome exercise, from a physiological point of view, is not necessarily motion toward death at all. To say that such actions or activities merely delay death is a kind of sophistry; for since death is, in physical terms, a negative state, it is much more pertinent and correct to say that they prolong and increase life. Indeed, time has much less to do with death—for death is, as a cessation of motion, also a cessation of time—than it has to do with life, its most complex embodiment. Thinking that time brings death is less a workable assumption than a moral evasion, an example of our chronic tendency to ascribe our woes and weaknesses to external circumstances rather than to living will.”

Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 118)