“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance 

“Time is an illusion.” – Albert Einstein

Hello friend,

This is my most favorite time of the year!  Summer has always been my season.  I love the warmth.  I love the t-shirts and shorts.  I love the swimming.  It all just feels like FREEDOM to me.  It always has.  Ben Rector has a song that sings to me called “Thank God For the Summertime,” and my favorite line is, “Thank God for the months after May…”  I have realized as I have aged that if I really dial it in, it is exactly in this first half of June that I feel the most giddiness, the most unbridled hope and enthusiasm for the days ahead of me.  Sure, I love the rest of June, and you will find me smiling any day of July or August, too—it is Summer after all—but it is these opening days of my season that have me truly intoxicated with Life.  It’s when it is all before me, my favorite three months.  None of it has slipped by yet.  I don’t have that tightening feeling I get in my chest in August when I know my season and my freedom are winding down.  Right now it is already magical, and there is only magic in the few months ahead.

That means I am perfectly present, right?  Fully in the moment, so grateful for the perfection that is NOW?  I wish!  I know I should have that equanimity, that contentedness knowing everything is exactly right is this beautiful moment.  Alas, instead of just appreciating the way Time is treating me right now, I can’t fight my impulse to plead with it.  I start begging Father Time to slow down.  PLEASE!!!!  Please slow down.  Make these glory days last forever.  Make Autumn never come.  Just freeze.  Or at least crawl by at a snail’s pace.  Make the minutes go by like hours.  Make every day seem like a month.  Just slow down!

It’s comical, really, this pleading.  Because of course I have just come off of the last couple of months of the school year, when I (and every other adult who works in a school) have been begging each weekday to go by faster and faster.  If you work in a school or know anyone who does, you know those last weeks are like a death march.  The kids are getting more and more obnoxious and giddy with the improvement in the weather and the proximity to their own freedom, a.k.a. Summer Vacation.  That obnoxiousness, of course, smashes up against every adults’ simple exhaustion and end-of-your-wits madness that comes from dealing with large groups of kids for nine months in a row.  It leads to a combustible mix that only comes to a merciful end when we all retreat to our separate corners for the Summer.  That glorious release is something we all agree must be expedited.  Let’s go, Father Time!  Move faster!  Get Summer here sooner!

I find myself closely tracking my pleading.  I am fascinated by my strange mixture of requests for Time to either slow down or speed up, often in ways that overlap and contradict one another.

As you might guess from my deep love of Summer, I loathe Winter.  With all of the bundling up and the cautious stepping on the sidewalk and the darkness and the frozen skin, it tends to feel like a six-month waste of my precious time.  I don’t get any of that Freedom feeling that Summer provides.  Thus, I always beg for Winter to fly by so I can get to the good stuff, which I demand to slow down.  Even though my work has intrinsic rewards, I still want the work hours to fly by and can hardly wait for the weekends.  Then I want those two days to last as long as the other five did.  Of course, as Spring Break approaches, I want those weeks to go even faster (you know, so I can slow it way down for that one week at the beach).  On and on it goes.

Of course, even in the midst of all of these efforts to speed through weeks or seasons, the overarching theme of my existence is to get Time to slow down for me (even if it is just for me).  The thought of my teenage daughter leaving the house next year is absolutely killing me!  It’s been killing me since she was about six months old, when I realized how fast it was all going already.  Those pleas to Father Time are anguished ones, because seriously, how can this era with my kids in the nest not be the best days of my truly wonderful life?  The velocity of it all, though, is just too much.  I guess I think that way about the whole show.  It’s going too fast.  How can I already by this old?  Despite all the challenges and uncertainties, I love being alive in this world.  I want it to last and last.  And it’s not.  It is going SO FAST.  I feel that, and it pains me.  It makes me anxious if I think too hard about it.  It also makes me feel guilty any time I catch myself wishing a day or week or season would move faster.

Over the decades of my journaling, and especially in recent years as I have moved into the second half of life expectancy, I realize that I am completely obsessed with Time.  So much of what I think about and write about, the essence of it is Time.  I ponder on the way a month or a year feels like forever to a child but like nothing to an old person.  I am constantly wondering if my pursuits—my jobs, habits, and hobbies—are a “good use” of my time, if they are “worthwhile.”  In speaking with other parents, I grill them over their experience of witnessing their children’s milestones and how they are dealing with the speed of it all.  As my own parents approach their final years, I am captivated by how they must be processing decisions, like what kinds of responsibilities do they want to hang onto (e.g. keeping their forever home) or dare take on (e.g. a new dog).  Each responsibility you claim is a bet—a hope, really—that you will have the time and ability to see it through.  I can hardly imagine how those negotiations with Father Time go!  I am guessing I will handle them worse than most people do when I get to that age.

I have said before that when the end comes for me, I will have to be dragged kicking and screaming from this life.  Even though I always imagined I would die young, I can’t seem to get enough of this place and all of its new experiences and people to learn about.  How could there ever be time enough to study it all and try it all out?  This may explain why this thing about Time moving faster as you age feels like such a curse to me.  The longer I live, the more I want to do and see and feel.  Every year I get more greedy for extra time.  Meanwhile, every year it seems to disappear faster.  That mismatch stirs up a real tension in my soul.  It’s like trying to shout louder at someone moving away from you in the wind only to realize that try as you might, your voice just gets quieter.  There’s a deep pain in that futility.  It’s loss.  I can feel myself grieving it already.

I suppose I am disappointed with myself for allowing something I can see happening and don’t seem to have any control over to bother me so much.  Every time I plead for Time to speed up or slow down, I recognize both how silly it is and how it is essentially a failure on my part to simply stay in the present and experience Life fully.  It’s like the more aware I am of the absolute importance of being in the moment and how foolish the rest of it is, the more I am disappointed in my obsession with the speed of Time’s passing.  Why can’t I just let it go once and for all?  Why must I continue to beg and plead?  But as I look through my journal entries, most of them seem to follow the same pattern: rant and rave about Time moving too fast or too slow as it relates to this or that (e.g. work day, vacation, Winter, my children’s childhoods, an election cycle, waiting for a package to arrive, etc.), then finishing with the realization that I simply need to be present and flow.  Just flow.  But then the next day I fight the same fights in my mind and in the pages of my journal, always returning to the importance of the moment and the flow.  I guess I’m just not very good at it.

How about you?  How much energy do you spend in the futile pursuit of pleading with Time to speed up or slow down?  Open up your journal and consider the different ways your mind tries to manipulate the flow of this concept that just keeps marching on.  Do you tend to want it to slow down or speed up more often?  When do you want time to accelerate?  Is it right when you get to work?  Is it Monday morning, hoping to Fast-Forward to the weekend?  Is there a time of the year you would rather breeze past, like the holidays or the Winter?  Do you want Time to speed up when you have something exciting on the horizon, like a vacation or a concert, that you are really looking forward to?  What about when your political party or leader is not in power: do you plead with Time to speed up until the next big election?  How about the other extreme: when do you beg Time to slow down?  Do you have a favorite season or month that you wish would go on forever?  How about when you are on vacation (I get obsessed with how fast the days are going by)?  Does it depend on how happy you are and how well things are going for you?  For example, when you are in a new relationship and maybe falling in love or if you are shining at work, do you plead with Time to slow down?  How do you think having children affects this?  Even though I am begging for more time with my kids as kids, I admit that I am also wildly curious to see what kind of adults they turn into.  Does having older loved ones—like aging parents—make you ask for more time, or are you good at simply recognizing how little time is left and thus appreciating each moment with them?  How much of all this wishing, begging, and pleading is a waste of your time?  Would you be better off just focusing on the present?  Or is acknowledging your wishes to speed it up or slow it down a good reminder to prioritize the best things in Life and scale back on the stuff that you are just trying to endure?  How well do you do with finding a happy flow with it all?  For the rest of your journey here, would you rather Time speed up or slow down compared to how you perceive it now?  How has that changed over the course of your life?  How do you think your answer would change if you were 10% happier?  Would you ask to slow it down?  What would make you want to speed it up?  Leave me a reply and let me know: What do you ask of Father Time?

Wishing you Peace,

William

P.S. If this topic resonated with you today, please share it with your community.  Let’s help each other make the best use of our moments in the short time we have here.

P.P.S. If this way of examining your life appeals to you, consider buying my book, Journal of YOU: Uncovering The Beauty That Is Your Truth, at your favorite online retailers.  Namaste.