Self-mastery Nº101
The irony of time
Sameness. It’s a sensation hiding in plain sight. The days we live in can be beautiful, surprising and unique. But the sad reality is it’s getting easier to feel lost as each to their own is now seemingly converging into one.
My mistful crimson morning walks are where I think about this lately. It feels like we’re all experiencing the same life. Time moves on, life feels faster. The route is the same, as are the rules. For most of my life, I thought time worked against me. Time only seems to slow down when we elicit fear. When we’re struggling. Why not when we feel joy?
Time does not warp due to the brain changing speed or life suddenly being on fast forward. It’s illusive. And what then goes unnoticed is the long-term effect it has on someone who has had the “pleasure” of being put in several situations that make them feel as if time slowed down. I know what it’s like. Your memories feel longer and longer as you grow older and more detached from them. Why?
As people get older, they feel like time flies faster. Have you felt like this? In itself, it’s an issue—as we all probably know someone who likes to bring up the “good old days”, perhaps one time too many. “People are often amazed at how much they remember from the days that seemed to last forever in their youth.” Professor Adrian Bejan once said. “It’s not that their experiences were much deeper or more meaningful, it’s just that they were being processed in rapid fire.”
He argues: as we get older, the neurons in our brain increase in size and complexity. “Electrical signals have to traverse greater distances and signal processing takes more time. Moreover, ageing causes our nerves to accumulate damage that provides resistance resistance to the flow of electrical signals, further slowing processing time.” It means that as we age, we possibly perceive fewer ‘frames per second’, and more actual time passes between each new mental image we perceive. Whereas when we’re young, every second of actual time is packed with many mental images, like a slow-motion camera capturing thousands of images per second. In short, we capture so much when we’re younger. And we stimulate and process less as we mature.
While the increase in pace offers a faster release of suffering from those who wish, the lifetime weighting it bears is problematic. For example, let’s say you were born in bad circumstances. Ages 0 to 18 are where we’re least in control, where we tend to have the least amount of possibilities to change things. Yet those years will feel the longest by default—and may be stretched further from the stress effect I mentioned earlier.
Of course, I can’t ignore that even in happy childhoods, those years can still feel long. But without option, and more often, people once in harsher circumstances may find that, as they get older and time goes by faster and faster every year and old, stressful and stretched memories remain the same—the feeling settles in that old trauma took comparatively longer due to the perception of time now speeding up when it’s over.
How do we solve this feeling?
The irony of time is it takes time. And time is always cruel.
In the end, time is felt, and how time feels for each individual is how it is. Most people would probably choose not to have their perception of time speed up if they could. But because no one has said choice, it is not qualified as an illness, even though it most definitely would. Just like how ageing is not qualified as an illness because everyone is affected.
Heather Havrilesky wrote about the feeling of being behind, which helped me remedy the feeling of quickening time.
No one is ahead or behind. No one is best or better. Every day you’re alive, you have a new opportunity to enjoy existence on this strange planet.
Unfortunately, right now you’re tripping. You’re confused about reality and time and it’s panicking you. And nothing will make you more special than learning to appreciate the perfect ragged textures of this moment, right now.
You are very, very young but even if you were 94 instead of 24, I’d tell you the same thing: Your focus needs to be on how well you can soak up the small satisfactions of this day – the little connections, the movement of your gorgeous mind from one thought to the next, the brilliance of your body’s motion in space, the light from the window, the sounds from the street below.
Escape the suffering of anxiety, or the depressions of the past, and trust it will slow you down. Be here, today, free from burden. “Our job is to luxuriate in the present, everything good starts here”, as Havrilesky says. Presence makes us special because the moments we once captured in slow motion can make space for new moments today. If you let it. Set aside the noise of our short-sighted culture and see for yourself who you are. You’ll feel, in your cells, how incredibly lucky you are to be here. And you’ll realise there is no race in your life and no such finish line exists.