When I was growing up, I would sometimes wish for time to pass quickly so I could get to a day I was looking forward to. I’d count down the days until Christmas, my birthday, summer vacation and if I could have, I would’ve waved a magic wand and made the intervening days instantly disappear. Childhood and teenage years are a chapter in our lives when there is little or no thought given to the limited nature of our lives. That was true for me anyway. But even as an adult when I was a teacher, there were the difficult school years of 1975-76 and 1989-90 when I wished that time would pass by quickly. Maybe when you are 25 and 40 you’re still young enough to want time to speed by in return for relief from the present moment.
Now I have reached an age where I want time to slow down. I thought that was going to be what would happen when I retired. I was concerned that I would need activities since I didn’t have a full-time teaching schedule and now had many hours to fill during the day. I went to Mystic Seaport to get an application to volunteer once the school year started. My plan was to substitute a day or two in local schools and volunteer at the Seaport several times a month. Together with my involvement in the Quaker meeting and volunteering at the hospital, I hoped that would be enough to fill the hours of the week that had been taken up by work for 35 years. However, once September rolled around, I was surprised to find that the days seemed to go by more quickly than they ever had. In fact, that perspective of time speeding up intensified as the post-retirement months and years passed by.
It turns out that time seeming to pass more quickly as we age is not just something we imagine. Scientific research indicates that the way our brains process information changes our perspective on time as the years go by. For example, when we’re children and go to the beach for the beach for the first time, everything we experience, such as playing in the sand, feeling the cold water on our arms and legs, the hot sun on our backs, is new to us. Our brains work in such a way as to record these new experiences as memories more than they do recognized, familiar happenings. For that reason, subsequent trips to the beach, though still lots of fun, come to be seen as part of what we expect to happen on a summer day and thus result in fewer memories. Since childhood is a time when so much is new to us and we are therefore constantly having unique experiences, we tend to store more memories of those days than we do of times when we are older and so much of life has become more routine. The greater number of memories from childhood compared to when we’re adults creates the illusion that time lasted longer back then than in later years. The feeling of time flying by is a trick our minds play on us because of the way our memories receive and store information.
I am also aware these days of how much more time there is behind me than there is ahead. I remember things that happened when I was 50 and it can be unsettling at times to realize that’s the same amount of time that will pass should I be so fortunate as to reach 90. Mortality has become more personal; it now applies to me too! At one time, I would look at the oil paintings and black and white photographs of people who lived before me I was born and think of them as almost a different species. Now I see myself connected to them by the same constraints of time that I must also accept. That’s one of the thoughts that gives me a much more immediate perspective on the words of Isaiah than the disinterested one I had when I first read them as a kid at Community Baptist Church:
“All people are grass; their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.” Isaiah 40: 6-8
David James Madden