How to slow down time…
Here’s an interesting news item about how time can seem shorter as we get older. According to Steve Taylor, author of Making Time
, there is truth in ‘proportional theory’, the idea that as we get older, a year is a smaller proportion of our life as a whole, so it seems to pass more quickly. But he also believes that time seems to pass more slowly for children because they are taking in lots of information from the world around them. “Children are experiencing everything for the first time,” he says. “All their experiences are new… Children are incredibly awake to the world around us, so time passes more slowly for them.”
We’ve talked a lot in this blog about ‘living in the moment’ (as described by Eckhart Tolle in his book The Power Of Now ): the idea of being in touch with our senses and so experiencing the world as it really is, instead of just being lost in our thoughts as adults so often are. It’s interesting to make a connection between this and Steve Taylor’s ideas. Think back to an afternoon in which you were preoccupied with your thoughts for most of the time. When you think back to that afternoon, you will remember very little about it because you didn’t do anything. There will be nothing for your memory to latch on to, so it will seem to have been very short.
Now imagine instead an afternoon in which you met with some friends or explored a new place - or better still both. Or even an afternoon in which you just pottered in the garden but were alert to your senses so that you really experienced each moment: feeling the breeze on your face, the soil beneath your fingers, smelling the scent of the flowers. These afternoons will seem to have been much longer because you were interacting and taking in information from the world around you.
If you have practiced living in the moment yourself, you will already know how good it can feel, but you will also know how hard it can be to maintain that presence. The habit of living for most of the time in our minds instead of in the real world is deeply ingrained in most of us and it can be hard to break out of this ‘programming’. It is good, therefore, to have another reason to remember to make that change: the idea that it may allow us, at least subjectively, to experience longer lives.
