Shorter periods of time used to last longer as well. As a student I would sit in class, trying to pay attention to a lecture while periodically marking down the remaining minutes in my notebook. Sitting still for an hour? Impossible! For better or worse, when I was younger, “now” often felt like it would never end.
But as I get older I’m noticing that time is moving faster. It's not just my perception, it really is! It's like I'm gradually moving from the outside of the record to the inside - a year or a day used to seem so long that I could fit in all sorts of things, but now I just keep going around and around, faster and faster, and each rotation (a year, a week, a day) passes faster than the last. Any big event - Pride month, a trip to Europe, the Olympics - that has lots of build-up can occupy your time with planning and anticipation. Then, before you know it, it’s just another thing that happened to you and that you remember, because it’s already gone. In the same way, I used to dread Mondays. Now, I close my eyes for a moment, and just like that, it’s Friday again. This wouldn’t be so bad if the passing of each week didn’t mean I’ve also aged by a week - the workweek passing quickly I can handle. Another week of my life gone, never to return? That’s a different story.
Perceiving this constant movement of time is normal as we get older, so my observations are hardly unique. I think most people my age agree the days seem to be passing faster, but I don't know if we all agree as to why. Is it because one year out of forty is a smaller percentage of your life than one year out of twenty? Or is it because as we get older we tend to fall into routines of work or family where the days are more similar and they all blend together, our individual experiences too similar to each other to stand out and make the days feel like they're lasting longer than they are? I don't know.
Brainpickings has an excellent post on this. Quoting from Marc Whitman's Felt Time:
In order to feel that one’s life is flowing more slowly — and fully — one might seek out new situations over and over to have novel experiences that, because of their emotional value, are retained by memory over the long term. Greater variety makes a given period of life expand in retrospect. Life passes more slowly. If one challenges oneself consistently, it pays off, over the years, as the feeling of having lived fully — and, most importantly, of having lived for a long time.
I'm not in a position to claim this as a universal truth, but it certainly rings true for me, as my life has a more consistent daily routine than it ever did before. Regardless of the cause, the perception that time is moving faster can be difficult to accept. When time feels like it's moving slower, a day or a week or even a moment can last long enough to enjoy without worrying about its inevitable end. But as I realize time is constantly moving forward, I know that this moment or day or week, as great as it may be, will definitely end, and soon, and that leads to a kind of melancholy I never experienced in my youth. Awareness of impermanence can be a good thing when I'm sitting in a boring meeting at work, but it has the potential to lead to considerable sadness when I'm watching my kids play in the yard.
My understanding of time is changing as I age; again, it’s not really a unique experience, but like so many things it’s something you don’t think about (or even believe) until it starts happening to you. When time moved slower it was easy to be fooled into seeing life as a series of moments that I could get lost in - when “now” lasted longer I didn’t notice the passing of the weeks and years.. But now I realize that time isn’t a series of moments so much as one constant motion that never stops.
A lot of my changing perception of this comes from Buddhist ideas on time and the impermanence of everything. As Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen teacher who did much to popularize Zen in North America, said, when asked to summarize Buddhism in only a few words: “Everything changes.” In Buddhism, the inability to accept that everything changes is what causes suffering - we become attached to things (people, situations, possessions) that are, by their very nature, impermanent, and subject to decay and that will eventually disappear (ourselves included!). And because we fail to recognize that change is constant, we can be unprepared when what we once loved grows or changes or disappears altogether. This is where meditation comes in as an essential part of Buddhist practice: by meditating, we can train our minds to stay more in the present moment instead of being distracted by memories of the past or anticipation of the future. You realize that each moment is in a sense eternity. It’s a weird feeling, but when it happens, it feels very real.
When our minds are thinking more about the past or the future than the present, we’re just lost in our own thoughts, which are still taking place right now. David Cain, on Raptitude, wrote that “Life is an experiential, right-now experience, and that’s it. We can speculate, remember, plan and fear, but those experiences too only happen here: between your ears, in this room, now and only ever now.” The truth is that, whether we realize it or not, we’re always living in the moment, and everything that has ever or will ever happen to us is happening right now, but sometimes we forget to notice the things happening outside of our heads. Doing this is a struggle for me, but I’ve found a combination of meditation and aging have certainly helped.
(I originally wrote this in 2018. I recently found the draft, and updated it with some minor changes before posting. If it matters.)
