Grappling With Time
The ticking takes on a frantic pace
My daughter is 11 now. I remember the day we first brought her home like it was yesterday. She seemed so fragile. We didn’t know what to do with her. We were terrified.
Now, she’s almost my height. She’s a gorgeous, statuesque young lady. She’s smart, feisty, sassy, and hilarious. It all happened in a flash.
The passage of time first hit me when I realized that so many major events in my life had happened twenty years ago. Now that I’m 50, my teenage exploits, of which there were many, were over thirty years ago. That’s a grown adult’s worth of time. I’ve lived the lifespan of two fully developed, responsible members of society.
As we get older, our past experiences become much smaller pieces of a huge pie. Long stretches of time zip by. A year used to feel like an eternity, while now it just feels like one spin of the wheel. Meanwhile, we keep rolling on.
The days, weeks, and years can begin to blend in. Everything gets jumbled up because you’ve done so much. It’s harder to place when things happened, never mind how they actually went down.
My mental health has contributed to my perception of time. ADHD causes “time blindness.” For me, that means time feels like it’s moving really fast. Faster than it appears to other people. When I’m in a bipolar hypomanic state, time also moves very rapidly. When you combine this with the fact that the brain’s internal clock slows with age, there are real, physical reasons why life seems to be passing me by.
Our brains also process less novel experiences as we age, so we don’t have a vast collection of unique memories to mark the passage of time. If there were all these things I was doing for the first time, life wouldn’t seem so rapid-paced. That might be a sign that I’m not doing nearly enough.
Those twenty-year-old memories stand out because that’s when I was busiest doing the most exciting things that felt new. I was exploring life as an adult for the first time. Things weren’t boring yet. Everything was fresh.
Now, I’ve done a million reps of everything. I’ve been around the block. Life doesn’t excite me like it used to.
So the time is whizzing by, unobstructed by memorable events. When time bumps into one of these events, it slows down. We take it in. We absorb it. It becomes a marker.
I need to build new memories. Meet new people. Engage in life more. Try things I never thought I would. Or risk racing toward the end.
Sometimes it feels like I’m sprinting toward my final days, and the treadmill speed keeps going up. I’m moving faster than I would if I were trying to outrun a predator. I don’t know what my rush is.
It’s like I have blinders on. I’m forced to look down and keep galloping away. I get the feeling I’m trying to get as far away from the past as possible.
The idea of a Block Universe posits that everything exists, past, present, and future, simultaneously, inside a four-dimensional block. The concept of time itself, according to Einstein, is only an illusion.
If all experiences exist simultaneously in spacetime, why can we only identify those memories designated as past? Why couldn’t our collective lifetime of memories make life move at a more consistent pace?
Maybe it’s not time at all that’s the culprit. Maybe it’s all about insufficient living, a lack of doing, not a lack of time to do it.
It’s only what we can remember that affects our perception of time, not all the memorable things we’ve forgotten. Imagine how many more memories we could have if we were diligently mindful and aware at all times. How much fuller would life feel? How much slower would the world appear to be moving?
We need to keep ourselves off automatic more of the time. When we can move through our day without much thought, mindlessly switching from task to task until we’ve fulfilled our programming, we don’t make our brains work. We don’t give them a reason to grow by making new connections. Days blend into each other more and more. There’s nothing to remember.
It’s hard not to fall victim to the trap. We want to make things comfortable for ourselves, but with comfort comes complacency.
You set your life up so you don’t have to think, but you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t force yourself to make up the mental workout elsewhere. Our minds are not designed to live without problems to solve. Sometimes we even create some just to figure them out.
It’s better to choose positive outlets for memory building than to rely on life’s tribulations for memorable moments. Things will always happen. Problems will arise. If you don’t have some good thoughts of your past to remind you that things aren’t always bad, you’ll paint all of life with the same brush.
Slow the hands of time by fully engaging your life. Broaden your horizons and widen your breadth of experiences. Do what you’ve always wanted to and what you never thought you could. Collect those special moments that freeze time in place.
My book, Internal Jiu Jitsu: Conquering Mind and Body Resistance By Giving Way, is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books.org, or even better, at your local bookstore!.
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