A Time Machine
The passage of time is a curious topic. Depending on who you ask, you will likely get various perspectives about its pace. Ask a teenager, stuck in history class, at 2:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon about the time, and they will say a tortoise must be turning the dial as it creeps slowly to the dismissal bell. By contrast, an older person will swear to you that the clock is sprinting at an ever-increasing pace, hellbent on emptying the hourglass faster than you can imagine. Opposite ends of the spectrum for sure, and yet, both are watching a clock, that uses the same metrics. After all ,there are exactly 60 minutes in an hour for all of us; no more, no less. The measurement of time hasn’t changed, and it won’t change, no matter the circumstance.
I was involved in an interesting conversation recently about the value of time. The premise of the discussion was that you can buy almost everything, but you can’t buy time. You can buy convenience and a lifestyle that gives you more freedom with how you spend your time; but time isn’t for sale. No matter how much money you have, you still exist in a day that has 24 hours, and you can only use those hours as they come. There is no banking of time, no doubling down and being in two places at the same time. Whatever you are doing, that is what you are doing.
Sometimes I think we believe time is a commodity that can be transacted for; again, I think we confuse that with conveniences. Time isn’t a tradeable asset. It is a constant foundation that will remain as long as the earth rotates.
If we can’t work harder to buy more time, then presumably what we pursue is the freedom to determine how we use our time and the toys we use during our free time. I am sure that is the logic that drives most of us, but even that concept makes time seem so transactional; when in fact, I am starting to think time is much more about attitude and choice.
Look at it like this, there must be some basis for why different people describe time differently. “There’s never enough time in the day,” “I don’t know what happened to today, it just slipped away from me,” or “This day is dragging on forever,” are a few phrases you hear from people as they express how they feel with time as the foundation of their expression. You could easily overlook these throw away statements and move on, but I have been thinking that maybe time reflects how you view the moment you are in, and to some extent your history.
It is true that the older you get the more it seems like time is moving quickly. I think there are two things to consider. First, one day in the life of a 65-year-old isn’t a big percentage of their total days, but to a toddler, it is significant. With a large number of days behind you, the volume of experience tends to mash all the days together and cause us not to distinguish specific days. If every day is the same for a month, it will be hard to identify one day that stood out. The net result will be, if all the days are the same, your memory doesn’t create touchpoints. All it must go on is one distinctive moment from the past. Every day between then and now doesn’t stand out but the calendar said it was 30 days. Our mind can only conclude that time flew past. “Has it really been a month since I talked to her? Wow seems like only yesterday.”
Which leads to a second thought, which is the impact on diversity in your day. The surest way to make each day seem longer is to make each day have something different, special, or memorable. If you have had an intense week at work where you flew all over the place, sat in endless meetings with different people, ate out at different restaurants each evening, then by Friday you are saying, “this has been a very long week.” You may not think it was a good week, but time felt like it moved very slowly.
Again, the amount of time spent between the two above experiences is the same, what is different is what happened, and to some degree how the person who experienced it feels about it.
I mentioned time is a way we express attitude and I think that is true. If you have been fortunate enough in your life to have avoided personal tragedy or haven’t faced a pending personal loss, it is easy to think of time as a cheap, available commodity. But if you’re faced with the last chapters of your life, or you’re watching someone close to you who is in their last phases, time becomes totally different; it becomes a cherished asset. When a loss is coming, you don’t want to lose one second of time. In fact, you want the world to stop.
The reality though, is just like the teenager can’t get the bell to ring faster, a person trying to stop the course of future bad events can’t stop the hours from passing. There is nothing that will change that, and if you are a caregiver or you yourself are in a tough place physically, the days feel so fast and the future seems so accelerated.
I have been feeling this a lot lately. I have spent my entire career believing that if I wasn’t actively trying to be productive with my time, I would be falling behind; and maybe that’s true in a corporate sense. But when you realize you aren’t going to get more time, all the effort to stay busy seems so misguided. In fact, over a 35-year career, I have done so many things, but I can’t remember much of it. Did time go fast, or did I just not maximize my time to live more fully? It is a hard question, but not one I want to spend time on (no pun intended).
What I find more important is to understand how I can spend my time making each day last, if it can, through healthy activities and not yearnings for something else. I believe it is possible. I believe we can stop and “smell the roses,” and still be productive. I believe what James Taylor says in one of his songs, “the secret to life is enjoying the passage of time.”
And I don’t want a time machine. I wouldn’t know when to go back to. I don’t want to revisit the past. I want to embrace the present, the right now. If I do that well, then my 24 hours will feel like a good long day. And I hope I will have a lot of those.
