As you age, you’ll notice that time seems to speed up. Weeks feel like days, and months feel like weeks as you get on the down slope of life. There’s actually a scientific reason for that.
Studies have shown that younger brains process new information and form detailed memories, making time feel longer. As we age, this process slows, causing time to feel shorter. Older people also tend to have more firmly established routines, making it harder to distinguish one day from the next.
The lack of new experiences can lead to the feeling that time is just slipping away. Some believe that as we age, our brains change, becoming more efficient at recognizing patterns and establishing routines. This also makes us feel that time is moving faster, as we spend less time mulling over experiences, or even having what we regard as new experiences.
Whether any of this is actually true, I do know that perceived time, rather than clock time, seems to pass faster for me as I’ve aged.
I also know, though, that there are ways to slow this perception of time on jet skis, whizzing past at a dizzying rate, and it is something that I discovered by happenstance. Well, actually, it’s just one way, a process really, that I found myself doing because I hate being bored.
New experiences are the key to taking your foot off the accelerator of time. Develop a new hobby or learn something new, and while you won’t exactly go back to that time of your life when the twelve months between birthdays seemed like an eternity, you’ll also moderate the feeling that the years are zipping by in a matter of weeks.
It started when I retired from government service in 2012. Up to that time, I’d begun to notice that time seemed to move at an astonishingly rapid rate. My three years working in Zimbabwe, for example, seemed to go by much faster than the three years I’d worked at the Pentagon before that. After my retirement, I took a month off, doing nothing but puttering around the house, taking walks in the woods near the house, or watching TV. By the end of the month, which mercifully felt like a week, I was bored out of my skull.
So, I took a consulting job and threw myself into my writing. At the same time, I took up painting and photography again. Soon, every day was filled with something new to do, and while time was still going faster than I remember it doing when I was a kid, it was just walking fast instead of running.
None of this is scientific, mind you. Like the speeding up of time, it’s more a matter of feeling than physics. But that’s the objective. You want to shake the feeling that time is whizzing by. You want to stop and smell the roses. If you keep your mind active and engaged with new adventures, you’ll recapture some of those youthful mental processes. Each day, then, rather than melting into the day before, will be a new adventure.
Carpe diem. | NWI
