To a clock, a second will always be a second, a minute will never be more than a minute and an hour is an hour, hour after hour. For better or for worse, we are not clocks. To us time is relative, we perceive time differently in different situations, and the older we become the faster time flies by us. To put it in perspective imagine being two years old, one year is 50% of your life, now imagine you are thirty years old, one year is 1/30 of your life, or .03%. According to Maximilian Kiener’s Digital Time Project (the link I have attached below), waiting 24 days for Christmas at age 5 feels like waiting a year at age 54. He goes on to say that if you consider that you don’t recall much of your first three years on this planet, then half of your perceived life is over by age 18… We all know that we have lost track of time, we don’t know exactly when we started losing our internal clock but time has been passing faster than it ever did when we were young.
I cannot stop time or slow it down even, but I do think that I know how to make time feel like it did in our golden age of childhood. Here are my ideas on how to catch time:
Have More Firsts: When you are a kid, everything you do or see seems new and exciting because it is the first time that you are experiencing it. If you can find a way to have more firsts in your life you will have more markers for time, more days that stand out when you look back and try to chronicle your years. They say there is a first time for everything, so go and have a first time for everything.
Be Spontaneous: Have as many random days as possible. Take time to do what your impulses tell you to do, it can be as simple as waking up early to hike or as drastic as hopping on a plane and flying to an island. Spontaneity keeps you feeling alive and once again helps split up the monotony of your everyday life.
Engage Your Brain: You should stress your brain out, in the most healthy way possible. Try to learn new things or tackle new challenges, read new books or develop new skills. When you learn to do something new your brain is fully activated and engaged, which helps you be more conscious of time which makes it harder for all that time to sneak by you.
Scare the Shit Out of Yourself: This one speaks for itself, do anything you can think of that scares you. From public speaking to sky diving, anything that gets your heart rate up and kicks in a little anxiety is actually good for helping slow down time. We can all attest that time goes the slowest when we are nervous and want it to hurry the hell up.
Have Lazy Days: Take a slow Saturday or Sunday and turn it into a really slow Saturday or Sunday. Have a day to yourself that you don’t feel you need to rush through or be overly productive. Spend time with family or friends just doing nothing special, the weeks fly by fast enough there is no need to always rush through the weekend too!
A traveling man once said, “Routine is the enemy of time”, meaning that having a routine numbs you to life and doesn’t allow you to perceive all of the beautiful time that you are given on this earth. If you are lucky you will live 80 years or more, most of us will live less, so if you want to remember each of those years you have to try and catch the time before it flies away for good.
Cheers
dubekid 