So, we've looked at how time can move at different speeds for different people and different situations... now what about different ages?? Older folks have told me how time seems to speed up the older you get, so that once you're in your 50s, 60s or 70s, it's just zipping by! And yet, when you are young, time seems to stretch out forever! Is it just that as we get closer to the end of our lifespan, the remaining time left trickles away quicker, than when we have our whole life ahead of us?? Or is it that older folks have many more memories built up and there is a relativity that creeps in, with so many more years gone by than are yet to come? Or is it something else??
Is it perhaps that young children, infants and toddlers have very little concept of time. They live primarily in the "now". Tomorrow or "later" does not exist for them. They want things "now" because "now" is all that exists. In that space of living in the "now", is it possible that time moves more slowly for them?? We wonder at how children can learn language so quickly... perhaps it is because our sense of time is not their sense of time. Perhaps time expands for them and they have more than enough time to learn language and other things... But, as we get older, we slip out of the "now" and into the past and the future, thereby losing our sense of expanded time. The older we get the more likely we are to reminisce on the past, or anticipate the future... thereby speeding up time.
What would life be like if we could regain that early childlike wonder with what is happening in the "now", in this moment, and not the moments that have passed or the moments to come?
1 comment:
Not only do we as adults reminisce on the past and anticipate the future, we spend a lot of our "time" worrying about our responsibilities and our regrets. These are things that don't concern children. Children focus on what they are doing at any particular moment, or as you said, "now". One of the only ways to get a child to understand time is to say that such-and-such an event will take place in so many sleeps. Kids understand bedtime and sleep, because then they have to stop what they are doing "now". We as adults can get back to living in the moment. We just need to let go of all those distractions, be care-free and focus on now, even if for only a few minutes every day. Thoroughly enjoy the quiet or the scenery or whatever is happening now for you...by meditation, art/music or prayer...like children do. We can certainly learn a lot from how children live their lives.
Thank you for this Musing!
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