How to Slow the Passage of Time

Summer is here.

In Texas, at least.

On sticky summer mornings I can't help but return to boyhood in my heart.

I was a boy who woke up with a cowlick of blonde hair on his head and eyes alight with anticipation for a long day under a hot sun. My skinny legs, already toasted to a caramel hue by late May, would motor me down the stairs to gobble up some eggs and bacon as the streets warmed outside the kitchen windows.

Those few summers, when innocence and independence commingled before parting ways, there would be only one thing on my mind: the woods.

Us neighborhood boys found a bend in the railroad tracks that passed through the woods a mile or so from our houses. Near a certain spot along the tracks we located a drainage ditch, a culvert, a suitable location for a fort - and freedom.

We named our parcel of land The Penny Station because, each day, we balanced pennies on the railroad tracks and held our breath as the afternoon locomotive heaved its cargo through our woods and flattened our copper. We'd then pick the bits of smooth, hot metal - now free of Lincoln's face - from the granite railroad ballast and drive a nail through each piece to adorn the doorframe of our fort built from found lumber and fallen logs.

I don't recall us boys saying much to each other. It's as if we each had a job we were born knowing how to do; little men with a purpose we'd soon forget, only to spend the rest of our lives trying to find it again.

But I do recall moments. I remember scenes. I could close my eyes today and shuffle through a slideshow of memories in those woods - I can see each bird, every iteration of our fort, and the way the sun would set - kind of crooked - near the radio tower.

Time moved slowly those precious years.

And it only seems to speed up, doesn't it? Time.

"I'm worried time is going by too fast - how am I going to remember it all?" I recall saying to my father as I neared the end of high school and prepared to close out the chapter of life living with my family of origin.

He smiled and sighed like he'd just asked himself the same question that morning. He reminded me of an adage he’s tried to live by himself:

"You can slow time down by doing new things."

In effect what he was telling me, as I fearfully ventured toward college, was: Live it up. Cause a ruckus. Fill your days with adventure.

I've come to learn that unmemorable days strung together into months and years are the culprit behind our sense that we’re losing the battle against time. Weeks fly by unforgivingly when we're stacking predictable and uninteresting events on top of one another.

Thankfully there is another way.

When we inhabit our days instead of enduring them, working to fill our hours with moments we could easily recall decades later - we've slowed the clock on our own lives.

This is why summer vacation seemed so long as kids. We instigated adventures, days were open-ended and we searched for novel ways to fill our time. Moving into adulthood most of us traded predictability for novelty, and unknowingly wrote off years of our existence in exchange for a false sense of safety.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about mortality and the passage of time.

Maybe it's because my 20 year high school reunion is this fall. Or because I attended a retirement party for a mentor yesterday. Or because a friend recently posted about her wedding anniversary - maybe it was 10 years or 15 years, I don't recall - but I do recall her saying, "It's been forever in a flash." Our dog is old and her hips are giving her trouble.

My eyes sting when I write those lines above. My throat tightens a bit.

It all goes by so quickly.

I'm finishing the draft of this essay on my college campus (where I'm about to attend the retirement party mentioned above) - and it's like I keep running into my ghost as I retrace the steps I took as a lonely college student nearly two decades ago.

If I'm not careful, as I sit in the grass near the liberal arts building, I might catch myself whispering, I wish I could go back to 19 and do it all again.

But I know that's not the answer. We can't reclaim old time - the past is done and gone. We also can't know with certainty what actions now will permit us to live as long as we’d like into the future.

So, we're back to a lesson that's so easily forgotten:

Directing our energy into the past or toward the future is only preventing us from filling the present moment with meaning.

Oliver Burkeman wrote Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (the best book I read last year); as he reflects on our mortality, he urges us to keep our energy right here and now:

“Without noticing we’re doing it, we treat the future as intrinsically more valuable than the present. And yet the future never seems to arrive.”

I'd add to his observation that, neither can the past ever truly be revisited. Only pined after.

So it's up to us right now to fill this moment with as much energy, curiosity, depth, excitement, selflessness, risk, courage, and whimsy as we can muster.

Not for the purposes of one day being able to remember the 'glory days', but so we're never in a situation where we feel pressed to call on memories to validate the fullness of our lives. Because we're too busy making our lives full right now.

Even sad seasons are not wasted. A stretch of time with new life experiences is a valuable stretch indeed. Unpredictable and new experiences are the currency we’re trying to earn. How many rough patches of your life are now touchstones - crucial memories that have broadened your understanding of what it means to be alive?

We've only got so many more moments to string together - I say we make this ride last as long as we can by slowing time down and doing new things. Like an 11 year old on summer vacation whose singular response to waking up is wonder.