Time flies. Time flies so quickly that it has become one of my greatest fears. Time flies whether you are having fun or not, and that is what life is.
15 is the number of years I have lived for so far. 10 years ago, I was just a 5 year old, barely being able to string the words in my book together. I can only recall a couple of memories of myself back then, and it feels like an eternity ago. Although my 15 years seemed to go by quite slowly, I have recently noticed that each day feels a bit shorter, the week going by faster than the previous ones. When I turned 15, a scary thought came to me as I realized that I was halfway to turning 30. I thought I had more time till I was going to be in my 30s, but in reality, I do not. And since time goes by faster and faster by the day, who knows if 15 years would go by in a flash?
I adored but also despised the feeling of sitting on the couch on the day before new years, retracing my year and realizing how fast the time had gone by. One part of me was excited, making a mental list of the new goals I wanted to achieve that year, as the other side of me was torn and strained with emotions that weighed me down as I desperately wanted to find a way to make time go by slower. I felt as if I wasn’t taking every second to my full advantage, and that I was not grateful for each and every moment I had been given to live. I believed that I was the only one feeling this way, and that I could somehow discover a way to pass time slower, which leave me more satisfied with every action I took.
I had a couple of strategies that I thought would work. I started reflecting on myself more often. I did this by starting to journal, writing down thoughts I had through the day and listing the aspects of my life I was grateful for, no matter how big or small. I wrote down any goals I had no matter how far off it was in the future, or no matter how realistic anyone thought it was. It slowly became my safe space, where I could rely on only myself and my thoughts, not needing to share it with anyone and having the sense of relief that it was safe from the world outside me.
Furthermore, I started to meditate after I read a couple of books about meditation and Zen Buddhism. I had always been interested in mental health, and every book I read mentioned practising meditation. I was not a believer of meditation at first, as my ultimate goal was to have time go by slower, and I thought it would be a waste of time. However, I am also a firm believer in taking risks, so one morning, I deliberately decided to try meditation. And after that one morning, I never miss out on meditation every morning.
Meditation is a technique that is easier said than done. It focuses on mindfulness, training your mind to attention and awareness, and ultimately achieving a clear and peaceful state of mind. What struck me so much is the feeling after you meditate. Despite the crazy emotions I had, the short amount of time that I took each day to take my mind off the things that were weighing me down allowed me to observe my feelings from a new perspective, which let me understand that it was okay to feel that way, and I started to work through the emotions.
I believed that this way, time would go by slower because I could be more conscious of every decision I made and be more present in the moment.
Throughout the process of me trying to discover and experiment with techniques that perhaps could slow down time, I came to a slow understanding it was impossible.
What I realized is that as we age, time goes by slower because each day will be a smaller fraction of our life.
An easier way to explain this would be to look at life as the number of days we have lived so far. The day that we are born, that single day is the only day you have ever experienced life. As another day comes along, life for us is now a total of 2 days and the day that we will live is half of our total life. On the third day, it is a third, and so on. So, as we get older, we experience more of life, slowly becoming more familiar with everything around us, and one day becomes a smaller fraction of the total days we have lived for, making it seem shorter.
I want you to recall the memories that you have throughout your life. You will realize that the memories you have recalled have an extremely strong sense of emotion, and whatever emotion it is, it is the memory of an experience that you do not have as often. This is because our brain grabs hold of new experiences and not the familiar ones. For example, it would be difficult to remember something you do every day, for example, eat breakfast. If someone had told you to remember every single time you had breakfast, it would nearly be impossible to have the exact memory of each day. On the other hand, a memory of getting stung by a jellyfish, or the day you won your first award, would come to you as a more vivid one. Humans recollect time based on the new and unique experiences we have over a given amount of time. This is why some memories struck us more clearly than the other, and time seems to go by quite fast when you are feeling a strong emotion.
However, this does not mean that we can’t live life to the best of our abilities. It is not necessarily true that as we get older, there are relatively fewer memories we will be able to create through new experiences. This is where a couple of the strategies I listed above comes to play. Meditation, allowing us to focus more on being in the present, brings our attention to smaller details which we do not notice as often, creating new realizations that lead to stronger memories. Furthermore, recalling what we are grateful for, writing goals and reflecting on the actions that we take during the day will allow us to invest in ourselves mentally and create ideas that we had not been capable of thinking of which would be able to be the sole purpose of accomplishing the goals you had and taking time to meet others. All of which would be able to create memories, allowing time to be spent at your best advantage and truly be happy with how you had spent it.
Time should not be something that we fear, but more as what we cherish. Without time, life we are living now would not exist. We are given a certain amount of time for our life, and what we decide to spend it on depends on who you are and who you want to become. As time passes, we should focus on being present in the moment and taking what we are given to our advantage.
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