A boy, around six years old, had been very good at juggling, tossing, catching, bumping, all of that stuff. He did a lot of things which involved them up until he was six, when he needed to use them.
Let us say this boy's name is Ted.
The boy had bought a bunch of rubber bands and put them all together, to make little ball. He called it the Life Ball. It had many different symbols, numbers, colors, letters, and a lot of other pictures on it, but what things you saw depended on your perspective, your personal point of view.
After that day he spent a year inventing a pill that would make him need nothing to survive. He did not have to sleep, nor eat, nor drink... nothing.
He began to play with his Life Ball 24/7. He skipped school, skipped family time, skipped everything. He sat in his room playing with his ball. He just tossed it up in the ceiling and caught it. Three more years went by, and his parents worried immensely, wondering what he was doing.
Nobody could shake him from his attention to the ball. They tried in many different ways, but he just kept bouncing that ball. Eventually, his parents had scheduled him to see a psychologist. When they met, she asked him what he was doing.
"Playing with my Life Ball," he responded, still playing with it.
"Why do you call it that?" the psychologist asked.
"It is a ball that keeps track of how much time you have left in your life," the boy replied.
"How does it work?" she wondered, very perplexed at his response.
"Before you die, you become very, very weak," he began to explain. " And when the time arrives when I begin to struggle with this ball, that is when I will I know when I die."
The psychologist was stunned at how intelligent the ten year old boy was. When the boy left, she began thinking that the boy had the right idea.
Decades and decades progressed forward.
The boy was ignored during all of this time, until one day, when Ted was sixty-eight years old. A man came in to his house.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Playing with my Life Ball," Ted replied, in a monotonous tone.
"How does it work? What does it do?" the man questioned.
"It is a ball that predicts when you die, it works because right before you die you generally become weaker," Ted explained. "Before I die, I will struggle with juggling this ball. When it drops, I drop."
"Why is this important to you?" the man inquired.
"So then I know when I die, so I do not have to fear anymore," Ted replied.
"But what is the point of worrying when you die when you are already dead?" the man asked, as if he had planned this conversation on the exact word.
"What?" Ted said, still playing with his ball.
"Look at you, you have been playing this game for sixty-eight years," the man stated, placing his hand on Ted's head. "You have never lived a bit of your life, maybe only six years, but then you began working on making this ball, and the pill to keep you needless. You should have not worried about death when you could have lived your life. That was your chance, and now you only have-"
He released his hand.
"-Two years left."
Ted juggled the ball slower, as if he were taking in what the man had said.
"You spent your life on worrying about death, and you must realize that that's not worth living. If I lived worrying about death, I would be excited for death."
Ted began to struggle tossing the ball, and stopped.
"But my time... It's all gone..." he muttered, his face turning red.
"That's what you were looking forward to, what you were focusing on the whole time. It was a waste. Is there any point in living?" the man asked.
"My life is ruined... I wasted sixty-two years of my life on nothing, and only lived six years of life..." Ted stuttered, dropping the ball.
"The bad thing is, we don't have time machines." The man remarked.
"I can't redo it all?" Ted questioned.
"No," the man replied. "This was your cause, and now the effect came back and struck you hard. Cause and effect..."
"Go spend the last two years of your life, that's the only gift I'm giving you," the man said.
"Who are you?" Ted asked.
The man looked at him and smiled, then walked out of the room.
Ted tried to follow him, but the man was already gone.