In 1915, the 26-year-old T. S. Eliot published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prurock, one of his most durable poems. The dark, sad edge to it made it one of my favorites as a dark, pseudo-sad beatnik.

In the poem, the young Eliot laments “I grow old. I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Then he talks about mermaids. However, the part that lodged in my mind more recently was a line dropped into the middle of a stanza: I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.

When I was twenty, a time when at least two of my four food groups were coffee, I identified with this line. The passing of the day and the consumption of the coffee was, at some point, the same thing. Then I got older.

I questioned Eliot’s premise; just how do we measure out our lives. In caffeine consumption or in something more substantial. The older I got, the more I was convinced that the caffeine consumption, while enjoyable and habitual, was not a good vehicle for measuring anything. It dealt with quantity of days but did not touch quality.

Which, of course, left the question: how do we measure our lives. Or can we? Or should we?

At first blush, the answer to the last question is easy. Whether we should or not, most of us feel compelled to measure our days on a near-continuous basis. We may be the only species afflicted with self-doubt and a constant need to re-evaluate our actions. I believe that I (and possibly everybody else) was born with a built-in reservoir of insecurity which we visit daily.

The other two questions—can we measure our lives and how do we do that—are more difficult. Certainly, we want to have some sort of measure of our impact on the world around us. But it seems that finding the correct metric depends on more variables than my mind can handle.

Some people, I’m sure, don’t have that problem. Because of their accomplishments, their lives are measured by others. For instance, we recently lost two prominent Atlantans, both connected with the Atlanta Braves organization. The first was Ted Turner, one-time owner and very temporary manager of the team. Turner also created a number of cable television channels, married Jane Fonda, and put his name on a restaurant chain called Ted’s Montana Grill. It specialized in the meat of bison raised on his 114,000-acre ranch. The other Atlantan was Bobby Cox, long-time and very successful manager of the Braves. He rode a 556% winning percentage and 14 consecutive AL East titles into the baseball hall of fame. That he held the major league record of game ejections is just another fun fact.

Neither Turner nor Cox needed to worry about how their lives would be measured. Their accomplishments were so great the metrics simply paraded across the obituaries. That, however, is not terrible helpful to most of the rest of us. I’ll never manage a major league baseball team nor create an innovative cable TV channel. And I’ll certainly not reduce the proud bison to hamburger.

I did, however, get what may be a clue in—of all places—the checkout line at Kroger. Being a card-carrying introvert and generally eschewing human contact, I typically use the self-checkout. On this day, however, I turned into an empty lane that was attended by a person. I was putting my few items on the belt, when that person said, “You’re Chuck Holmes.”

Since I couldn’t think of an immediate reason to deny the accusation, I admitted I was.

“I worked for you for a while,” the checkout person said. That I didn’t doubt; one of the things my company did was customer-service surveys, and a lot of people moved through our phone rooms, some of them very quickly. But that was more than fifteen years ago.

I still didn’t recognize him, so I just nodded.

“It was a tough time for me. And you were kind.,”

That got my attention. I had no idea what sort of kindness (or perceived kindness) I had done for this person who would have been a young man at the time. For him to remember it and me all of these years later must have meant it made a deep impression on him, while making none at all on me.

Too embarrassed to ask him for details, I just muttered something about being glad I had helped.

Later, after I had gotten to the car, I realized that this encounter was more important than I realized. Something I had done nearly two decades ago had made an impression on somebody, even if it left none on me. Somebody’s life was—at least in his opinion—made a little better, and that’s an important thing. And I was remembered for it.

That thought cast whatever he was remembering in a very different light. It was evidently far more important than I considered it. Conversely, if I had done something equally unkind, it would have probably had the opposite effect. This, at least to me, meant that even acts that I considered inconsequential may well be consequential to someone, and I needed to consider them more carefully.

The other thing it meant is that we probably don’t measure out our lives. We simply live them from day to day or hour to hour, and others are measuring them for us, using not our coffee habits, but our actions as the measure.