It's about time

Time flies like an arrow
Fruit flies like a banana.

Let's leave the topic of fruits and quirks of languages for another time. Here we shall talk about the peculiar way we experience time and how and why it changes so much as we grow from our early years to our golden ones.

You surely remember how bored you'd get when you were 8 and you couldn't wait to grow up to be 10, 15, 18, 21 and more. Yet, time seemed to stand still. An hour, let alone a day, would feel like infinity. And then you blinked and found yourself a few decades forward in time and suddenly the arrow simile we started with hit home. Days, weeks, months and years now seem to follow each other at a dizzying speed. Whence the big change? What's going on? Which is the truer experience? Or, are they both illusory? What about time?

The famous physicist Dick Feynman was also intrigued and did some experiments when he was in high school to find out about personal differences. If I remember correctly, he writes about this in one of his autobiographical books, possibly Surely, You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman. He asks his friends to guess how long a minute is and uses his stopwatch to time them. Some come close to 60 seconds, and he finds that he usually is significantly faster, say around 50 seconds. And, being young and busy with more important things like math and physics, he doesn't get back to this question.

A good friend and I did. He just turned 50 something and told me how time seemed to speed up so much in his experience now compared to when he was younger. I concurred and asked him, how do you explain it? He said he didn't know, and I was surprised to be hit by a simple explanation, who knows from where. But, here is how it goes.

You know how we pay a lot more attention to things we desire. If we don't have it now, we want to get it in the future, preferably soon. We want what we don't have. It comes with the territory called life. When we are young, we lack life experience and we know it. Our gaze is set forward into the future. We are acutely aware of this lack of years of experience. Of course, as kids, we are blessed with exuberance, energy and intense focus, wonder and forgiveness. We take them all for granted. We want what we don't have: years of experience and being legal to drive and drink. This state of our mind, this focus on what we don't have gives us the experience of an excruciatingly slow flow rate of time. 

Fast forward, say we get to 40 or 50 years of age or more. What do we have now? A lot of life experience. Do we feel grateful for all that? No. We complain about getting old. Here is news for you, you don't get old. Your body does. But, that's a topic for another page and you can click here to read it later (Why, It is You!). When we feel old, we are under the influence of an insidious thought: life is short and we are running out of time! So, yes, we focus on what we don't have. Time is running short. And, therefore, it feels like an arrow. That's what gives us the experience of a dizzyingly fast flow rate of time.

Time is a topic of interest not only to us and students of physics (check out special relativity by Einstein and find out more about time!), but also students of metaphysics aka metaphysicians. Being a student of both myself, I accept that time is relative as Einstein put it, but more importantly, time is a paradox as metaphysics points out: things flow in time and as such they have speed. 65 miles an hour, 100 kph, 300000 km per second, etc.. What does time flow in? How could it flow at all? Does it indeed flow?

Let's close by reminding ourselves that it is always now. Time is a convention that helps us point to the order in the universe, how events seem to follow each other. But, whatever we experience in time, we experience it at the present moment, always here and now. We remember the past, now. We imagine the future, now. When we are young, we believe that we have many years yet to come, but, we don't have enough time in our past, so, that belief gives us the experience of time in slow motion. When we are at middle age, we can't complain that we are too young and we can't complain that we are too old, and feeling stuck right in the middle of such a confusion, we might experience a midlife crises. Fortunately, many are distracted by a job and kids and hobbies and news... And, when we are past all that, we believe that we no longer have enough time in our future, and we have so much time in the past, so, that strong belief gives us the experience of time in fast motion. 

The secret is out. Now, you know that how you think about your life, your past and your future, will determine how you experience the flow of time so to speak. It is not that time flows. It is the flow of events we experience. And we call it time. Now, you are in control. It is in your power to call the shots and slow or speed up time for yourself. Give it a try. Or as Yoda says, do, or don't. There is no time to try.

P.S. A disciple asks Buddha, what is the greatest mistake we make? Buddha says the greatest mistake you make is that you think that you've got time. 

P.P.S. Another disciple asks his enlightened master: Master, what did enlightenment give you? Master says everyday when I wake up, I no longer assume that I will see another sunset. Enlightenment gave me that knowledge.

What's Buddha up to? Many of us are busy thinking that life is short and there is no time. We keep busy with big things in life, job, social events, news, daily struggles and we think that we don't have time to pay attention to our feelings, our deepest desires now. We think that we've got time in the future to take care of the important things. And, that's what Buddha has in mind (Read more about Buddha on emotions by clicking here). Take care of the important things now. Let the dead bury the dead. You come to the wedding now. There is no time in the future. The last day of our lives let alone the last breath we take in need not be scary to think about. On the contrary, they are the best reminders of how precious this day and this breath and this moment are.