How to slow down the passing of time
Where does time go and why is it always in a rush to leave? Here’s what I do.
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There are hundreds of you on the mailing list already, which is quite mad considering I hadn’t really posted anything yet. I guess this shows you have faith in me and what I have to say and so I’d like to say a huge THANK YOU to all you early adopters, I see you. And I'm so excited to write for you here.
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How to slow down the passing of time.
I call my 91-year-old Grandmère every two weeks and in our conversations she never fails to say the same thing to me, “time is going so fast”. Every time I speak to her, it feels the sense of earnest in her voice is a little more than the time before.
I hear her. And in the same way a free-falling object accelerates as it approaches the cold, hard ground, the older we get, the faster the sands of time seem to slip through our fingers.
Today is the 1st June and it’s a date of note for two reasons. Firstly, it’s the official launch of A Day Well Spent, marked by the publishing of this first post (hooray!).
And secondly, we are now into the sixth month of 2023. At the end of this month, we’ll be exactly halfway through the year.
What? Already?
Yes, already.
And so the subject of time, its merciless march forwards and the small things we can do to slow down its passing feels like a fitting topic for this date and this first post.
Let’s face it, you probably don’t really have the time to be reading this. But here you are. So thank you.
The insidious vanishing of time.
I don’t mean that sense of time flying when you are indeed having fun. When you’re in a happy place or doing a joyous thing that eventually must come to an end - to catch the last train, to get the kids to bed, because you have an early start in the morning.
I’m talking about the other type of time passing. That more insidious vanishing of real hours / days / years.
Do any of the following sound familiar?
It was midday just a minute ago, now it’s 4pm?!
I need more hours in the day.
How is it Thursday already?
I’ve been driving for half an hour and I can’t recall a thing about how I got here.
Did that really happen this time last year, it feels like it was just last week.
Where has the time gone?
Statements most of us mutter into the wind on a daily basis.
Where does time go? And why is it always in a rush to leave?
I’ve been learning Spanish for almost four years now (don’t ask me to say anything, I’m still convinced I can hardly string a sentence together) and I vividly recall the time I asked my tutor, Ilenia, what the Spanish equivalent was for the verb ‘to spend time’.
“There is no spending of time in Spanish. It is not something we are buying or selling! The equivalent is pasar, to pass time.”
Her response struck me (the irony of this publication’s name is not lost on me here).
In a culture that encourages sleeping in the middle of the day and evening meals that are yet to begin come 10pm, time is not spent and things are done sin prisas, without hurry. Time is simply allowed to pass and enjoyed for what it is.
Time is a very abstract concept on the best of days. Clocks didn’t even really exist before the 17th century. Prior to that the rhythms of our daily lives were dictated by the position of the sun in the sky.
We have the same amount of ‘time' now as we did then. The time that passes between one sunrise and the next has never changed. So why are we so short on time today? Where does it go? And why is it always in such a rush to leave?
Certainly, our lives look quite different to those of medieval man. We just have so much to do.
Bills to pay, lists to clear, emails to send, cars to MOT, kids to feed, expectations to be met, people to please, world problems to solve.
But I also think it’s to do with how we perceive time and the way we live our lives in today’s modern world.