“How to Slow Down Time”
Friday, May 25, 2018 1:01
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“How to Slow Down Time”
by David Cain
“As I moved from my twenties to thirties I noticed a certain psychological miscalculation happening more often: a day that feels like it was three or four months ago was actually a year ago. Or I would think back to what I was doing this time last year, then realize that what I’m remembering happened two years ago. Almost everyone says this effect only gets stronger – time seems to speed up as you age, right until you die. Apparently, by the time you’re ninety, you make breakfast, and once you’ve tidied up the dishes it’s mid-afternoon. Then you read a book for a bit, and when you look up it’s dark.
Supposedly, this speeding-up sensation is unavoidable, because it’s linked inextricably to how increasingly small a year is in comparison to your age. To a one-year-old, a year is a lifetime, but to a fifty-year-old, it’s only 2% of a lifetime. This growing disparity makes it feel like time is slipping away ever more quickly.
That’s the popular explanation anyway – the one I heard, and repeated, for years. But it’s pure bunk. It doesn’t make any sense when you think about it. How long an hour, a week, or a year feels is something that changes all the time. Five days spent traveling in a foreign country tends to feel much longer than a regular workweek. An hour spent coping with tragic news can feel deadeningly slow, while an hour of frantic cleaning before guests arrive slips away like draining bathwater.
Our perception of time is psychological and subjective. There’s no reason to assume it’s tied to how long ago we were born. My three-hour flight seemed quick because I was somehow continually comparing it to my entire life? What? Did it feel the the same length to all 37 year-old passengers? Total bunk.
Time does seem to go by much more quickly in adulthood than it did in childhood though, and that seems pretty universal. As a kid, ninety-minute car rides were excruciatingly long, a week was a rich and varied chapter of life, and a year- the distance between birthdays – was an ocean of time.
So what causes this difference, and why do so many people feel like time is gradually speeding up? It’s probably a combination of things.
Why early years seem longer: As we become adults, we tend to take on more time commitments. We need to work, maintain a household, and fulfill obligations to others. Children usually have no time commitments, or if they do, they don’t need to think about them much – someone tells you when it’s time for chores or swimming lessons.
Because these commitments are so important to manage, adult life is characterized by thoughts and worries about time. For us, time always feels limited and scarce, whereas for children, who are busy experiencing life, it’s mostly an abstract thing grownups are always fretting about. There’s nothing we grownups think about more than time – how things are going to go, could go, or did go.
Our early years also seem longer because they contain so many firsts – first thunderstorm, first swim in the ocean, first kiss, first car, first real job – each of which makes the year in which it happened seem more significant to the overall arc of life, creating a strong sense of progress and time well used.
Compare that to the life of a middle-aged adult, which is much more governed by routine and repetition. Day after day, the same tasks are performed, the same roles embodied, the same forms of entertainment enjoyed. At mid-life, chances are you make new friends much less frequently, you move much less often, and you try things for the first time only rarely.
This is very normal. As your career and domestic life stabilize, the years increasingly resemble each other – except, of course, for the age number itself, which ticks over every 365 days just the same as always. This creates the sense that less “living” happens each year, and that there’s more and more you’ll never get around to.
On top of all this, some scientists also say that children simply form higher-quality memories – ones that are sharper and more lasting – than adults do. Certain memory-related receptors in the brain decline with age, making early years seem that much more dense with experience and meaning than recent ones.
So don’t worry. You’re not accelerating towards your grave. It’s just a series of compounding illusions that tend to happen when we habitually ruminate about time. And there are things we can do to see through those illusions.
Lengthening our years by deepening our days: Recently, on a friend’s birthday we had the usual conversation thirty-somethings have about time flying by. I think I said I couldn’t believe I’d lived in my current neighborhood for a year already. But when I thought about it later, it doesn’t seem like the time flew by. I’m just used to saying that. This past year really felt like a year.
In fact, I’d say the same about the previous year, and that points to the main reason time seems to have slowed down for me: meditation. Over the past two years I’ve greatly deepened my meditation practice. Much more of my life is spent with my attention on present moment experience, and much less is spent projecting, analyzing, rehearsing and reliving things in my head. This reinvestment of attention in present moment experience really makes time seem to slow down – and that provides a compelling clue about what causes it to speed up.
Adults tend to operate much more on autopilot: performing the super-familiar tasks of domestic life while most of their attention is on some past, future, or hypothetical moment. As children we’re immersed, quite helplessly, in present moment experience, which creates long, vivid days, with many more touchpoints for memory and appreciation.
Mindfulness, one of the qualities developed in meditation, begins to shift the balance back, effectively lengthening our lives by deepening our days and years. The more life is weighted towards attending to present moment experience, the more abundant time seems. Ordinary life becomes richer and more novel, much like childhood, except that you retain all your adult wisdom. Tiny experiences such as hanging up a coat or getting into your car, can feel quite fulfilling and complete in themselves, because you don’t feel like you need to be somewhere else already.
It is possible to fulfill your adult time commitments with your attention on the experience itself – of working, driving, cleaning, whatever it is. If you make a practice of that, much less of your life will be spent glossing over present-moment experience with compulsive thinking about what’s happening later.
I’m always wary about slipping into meditation evangelism whenever it comes up – you’re probably already either sold on it, or sold on not doing it. But you don’t need to meditate in order to slow down time. You just need to invest more attention in present-moment experience, one way or another. Two simple ways to do this:
•Do more physical activities, ones that you can’t do absent-mindedly: arts and crafts, sports, gardening, dancing
•Spend more time with people you enjoy talking to
Both are memorable and rewarding, and require too much ongoing attention for your mind to slip into rumination. A year spent focusing on things you can’t do absent-mindedly is a long, memorable year that can’t slip by unnoticed.
It’s only when we’re fretting about the future or reminiscing over the past that life seems too short, too fast, too out of control. When your attention is invested in present-moment experience, there is always exactly enough time. Every experience fits perfectly into its moment. Make a motto of it: ‘chop wood, carry water, be a friend.’”
Related:
Remember when you were 10 years old, and summer felt like it lasted forever? Got a little older, not so bad, still plenty of time to do everything you wanted. Someone told me back then that time speeds up the older you get. Being young, and knowing everything as the young do, I of course ridiculed this idea. But guess what- it’s true. Now I view life, and time, as a roller coaster with just one enormous riser. As you climb the beginning towards the top time is slower to pass. At 30 or so you’re at the very top, then you start the fall towards the bottom. Faster and faster you go, as time goes by ever quicker. Weeks and months flash by, and you wonder where it all went and as you descend ever faster you realize that somewhere on the tracks below there’s a solid brick wall or some other disaster awaiting your arrival. The only thing you don’t know is where on the tracks ahead of you it is. So you appreciate even more the things you can enjoy, and the people whom you love and that love you, because the ride isn’t going to last forever…
Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2018/05/how-to-slow-down-time.html
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This was all explained many years ago in the book “Catch 22.” If you want to make time slow down, and feel as though you are living longer, spend all of your time with the most boring people you can find.