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.
📺 Over the holidays I appeared on the MasterChef: Battle of the Critics (UK) Christmas special where the tables were turned and rather than critiquing other people’s food (my usual role on the show), I was the one cooking and had my food critiqued by Greg Wallace, John Torode and past winners. If you have access to the BBC I do recommended watching this, it was reviewed as ‘excellent TV’ which loosely translates to: people cry. You can watch it here on BBC iPlayer.
Hi! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter seeking pathways to more purposeful living.
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Hello everyone and a Happy New Year to you all; I hope it was joyful, peaceful and most importantly, delicious. I send these wishes from Buenos Aires where I’ve based myself for a few weeks and will remain until the end of January before heading back to London.
I’m easing myself gently into 2024 and trying to avoid the noise at this time of year. Noise about resolutions, goals, abstinence, what you should be doing, what you shouldn’t be doing, 2023 round-up reels, how to reduce your energy bills, January sales, and the rest.
If the start of 2024 has crept up on you seemingly out of nowhere and your response to the 1st of January was ‘What? Where did 2023 go? Wasn’t it summer just the other week?’, this piece is for you.
This is the first ever article I published here on A Day Well Spent, on its launch day seven months ago on 1st June. Back then the amount of readers I had was around 100 and now it’s over 3000(!), so I figure most of you haven’t read this.
It’s been behind a paywall all this time but because the turn of the year isn’t the easiest of calendar events to navigate for many — and because I’m still in a reflective and planning mode rather than a writing mode — I’ve decided to republish this and make it available for everyone to read.
This piece was recently given a shout-out by
in her wonderful musings what if… we do have time? And so if you couldn’t access it then, you can now. On the same theme, how to lengthen your life by — which includes an excerpt of Alain de Botton's "A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from the School of Life" about the strange, slippery nature of time and how to make the most of it — is another excellent read.On the note of planning (I’m a serial planner, which I talk a bit about here) I am slightly beside myself with excitement about all the things to come to this newsletter in 2024. There are many new people here who have joined as recently as the past month or so and so this is a collective welcome to you all.
I am so looking forward to continuing writing for you all here (doing so is possibly my favourite creative outlet), further nurturing this community and getting to know you all even better down in the comments.
In a world that glorifies busyness and wealth, maybe 2024 is the year we finally begin to see our time is the greatest commodity of all.
Thank you for being here and I hope you enjoy today’s post.
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.
Time viewed through the lens of scarcity and abundance.
In the Western world we generally perceive our lives to be finite and with a fixed end. As an extension of this, time is viewed through the lens of scarcity and the language we use is key to our relationship with it.
We are always running out of time, there is never enough time, we are short on time. And we certainly mustn’t waste time.
Time has become a commodity we can trade. We spend time and we buy time. It is something to maximize, optimize and bend to our will.
This contrasts with philosophies from the East where time is more often viewed through the lens of abundance.
There is a Buddhist-inspired affirmation I like to remind myself of during my more frazzled days:
“Life is eternal, so there is no need to worry and no need to hurry.”
Which is a lot easier said than done.
Whilst I don’t identify as Buddhist and I am undecided when it comes to the afterlife (maybe another post?), I resonate with its ideologies and often find myself leaning on them for support.
The power of mindfulness.
And then there is the relationship between time and mindfulness. Oh, not that bloody word again. That fluffy term shoe-horned into every self-help book and lifestyle article like the editor is on commission.
But mindfulness is in fact a quality, state or practice (any of the above will do) that is ancient and deeply rooted in many religious and spiritual teachings.
But what does mindfulness even mean?
There is no one definition; it will be interpreted by different people in different ways. To me, it is quite simply: being curious and noticing things.
Taking a moment to acknowledge the information your senses are transmitting to you - sights, sounds, tastes, touch, smells - stops your brain thinking about what happened yesterday or what you need to do tomorrow, and brings you right into the here and now.
And I have found this act of observation - of noticing things - seems to be a very effective way of slowing down the passing of time.
The gratitude journal.
There are endless reasons why people journal. To sleep better, to quieten the mind, to create order out of chaos, to de-compress, to find inspiration, to hash out ideas or thoughts, to name a few.
I started journaling a few years ago:
After a while, I realised two truths. One, I really missed spending time on words. And two, I was forgetting how to hold an actual pen and write in ink with my actual hand (true fact - wth).
And so to fill the void and ensure I didn’t lose this most vital life skill of basic dexterity, I started writing to and for myself in the form of journaling.
- My About page
I also have the world’s worst memory, so there was that too.
The other reason I started journaling was because life seemed to be racing by, days and weeks were blurring into a muddy pool of mixed up memories with little definition.
I was the epitome of ‘but really, how is it Thursday already?!’
I wanted to slow down the passing of time.
I mentioned my journaling to a TV colleague the other day and she responded in a perplexed and slightly defeated tone, “I don’t really understand what journaling is, why people do it or how to do it.” I suspect these sentiments resonate with many.
It’s different for everyone, but here’s one of the ways I journal and probably my favourite (I do a few different types - my bed is strewn with notebooks most evenings).
At the end of each day I fill one A5 sheet of paper in a nice notebook with my handwriting by answering the following questions:
What 3 things am I grateful for today?
What 3 things could I do tomorrow that would make it a great day?
An affirmation (I am…)
What 3 amazing things happened today?
This is a well worn format I take no credit for and is generally referred to as a Gratitude Journal.
What’s ‘amazing’ about taking the bins out?
Answers can range from the small (I’m grateful for the way the light plays on the landing floor at this time of year) to the big (I’m grateful for living during peacetime in this country).
My only advice here would be to avoid making it read like your checked off to do list - save that for a different notebook.
My list of ‘amazing’ things that happened today often stretches to 10 entries or more and it’s my favourite part of the journal. “Ten?!” I hear you spitting out your tea. “I can’t even think of one amazing thing that happened today.”
And this is sort of the point. When I first started journaling, I struggled to come up with ‘amazing’ entries too. It’s difficult when all you’ve really done since this time yesterday is sit at your desk, fill in your tax return and take the bins out.
But once I knew I needed to come up with something for this A5 piece of paper that would be glaring blankly at me before bed, I started to actively seek out the ‘amazing' things, just so I’d have something to write.
And that started to change how I viewed the world around me.
Sure, I took the bins out while it was raining and my socks got wet. But while I was doing that, I noticed a fox scuttle across the road that stopped dead to stare at me. And we stared at each other for a good 20 seconds.
And isn’t it just amazing that you can stare into the eyes of another species and we basically live side by side and mostly in harmony with wild canines?!
The 3 Rs (sort of): recall it, replay it, write it.
This daily journaling forces me to take the time to recall the moments that punctuate my day. I replay them in my mind, which usually brings a smile to my face. And writing it down then cements it.
It offloads my brain, empties my mind and I am fully primed for sleep.
And really, the amazing things could be and are anything. We don’t need to be jetting off to exotic lands or filling stadiums to be leading incredible lives.
Seeking out the surprising things that happen in the day-to-day humdrum of our reality is an excellent exercise in itself for recognising the extraordinary in the ordinary.
So how does any of this slow down the passing of time?
This journaling exercise takes me about 20-25 minutes and it’s the last thing I do almost every night, with the occasional exception. Some people prefer to do it first thing in the morning (I am not this person; I am barely functioning pre-11am).
Taking this amount of time out each day to actively recall, replay and write down what happened, means those little punctuations are seen and acknowledged.
And when you punctuate the passing of time with lots of different things - be they big or small - time morphs from an undefined haze of blurred vision, into a medley of moments with shape and form. And it starts to feel slower.
The other thing I do each night is I read that day’s entry a year ago. It helps reinforce a more truer sense of the passage of time:
“I remember visiting that café and their quite nice chairs. And yeah, that does feel like it was about a year ago.”
Finally, at the end of each year I read the entire year’s journal entries, as if it were a book. My own personal memoir from the past 12 months. I’m a slow reader so I usually start this around the beginning of December with the aim to finish it by the end of the year. Whilst still journaling in it each night.
It’s another really great exercise to recount all the seemingly insignificant - but in their own right, important - moments throughout the year. It gives me a sense of time and place, an understanding of what has grown or changed in that time, as well as a connection with the seasons.
To leave you with another Buddhist-inspired quote I quite like:
“Happiness is in the here and now, not if and when.”
Seek out your own wet socks and scuttling fox.