Is it just me, or does time behave differently as you get older?
In my experience, the past and present blur together more as I approach 40.
When you climb a mountain, the ground you have already traversed can appear very different as you ascend. In the same way, incidents that happened years ago can now feel very immediate, sometimes more immediate than when they happened. And just as strangely, a moment in the present can feel as if I’m living it years ago. I had not observed that elongated dynamic of time earlier in my life.
Having kids has definitely impacted my perception of time’s passing. In a way, time slows down when your kids are young. You get this clear sense that your kids’ childhood is something sacred, perhaps as sacred as anything you will ever witness, and you feel the urgency to drink in their every word and action. But alas, despite your best efforts to live in the present, you realise this period of time will “slip through your fingers like sand,” to quote a slightly mawkish song we used to sing years ago.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, in reflecting on our tendency to lament life’s fleeting nature, used the word evanescent. Everything soon passes out of sight, out of memory, out of existence. Rabbi Heschel believes life’s evanescence is not something to bemoan, but rather an integral part of its beauty. The realization that life is slipping through our fingers like sand can actually motivate us, because we desperately want to appreciate something of its beauty and profundity. Now, all of time suddenly becomes holy. In the words of Heschel: “Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time?” Reading Heschel made me see that a central part of the human calling is to cultivate a worshipper’s stance as time unfolds.
Recently, on my way to work, I multitasked and listened to a voice note from a colleague as I drove. Maybe it was the stress of my frazzled schedule getting to me, but the predominant thought as I listened was, “What if I were listening to this the morning after he died?”
I am aware that my reverie was off-the-wall, possibly even certifiable behaviour, but don’t you agree it would be eerie to hear a recording of a dead person’s voice? Everything takes on a different sheen when it is seen in the light of our mortality, of time’s evanescence. No wonder so many mystics and monastics start their day with a meditation on death. Remembering life’s evanescent nature does not diminish our experience of the present, but rather expands it.
Imagine if we could go back in time and immerse ourselves in any point in our past, even if it were just for 5 minutes, and could experience it through the lens of what has subsequently unfolded (that routine introduction was actually you meeting your spouse, e.g.). We would be utterly transfixed. Every second would be pregnant with meaning! Sometimes I wonder if the afterlife won’t include reliving scenes of our lives, but with a panoramic view of the whole. (Obviously, I am not rooting that in orthodox Christian theology, though it is fascinating that numerous NDE’s report seeing their lives flash before their eyes.)
What does seem clear is that we must love the unfolding of time. We must love it all–the unpaid bills, our unfinished tasks and unrealised career goals, the quagmires of our human relationships, the turmoil of current politics. We must love it, knowing it is part of a mini-drama that is best understood as one united whole.
With this approach, anxiety about the current moment leads to hope and even worship because we remember our earthly sojourn is one interconnected story. Our mantra can now change from, “This season is really hard,” to, “The God who began a good work in you will also bring it to pass.” And we can stand in awe at the constant unfolding of time
Wait. You’re not forty yet? What’s with the hair?
I value how you write this: “we remember our earthly sojourn is one interconnected story.” And the whole piece, really. I, too, suspect the after-life to include opportunity to see our life story (perhaps “in real time”?) segment by segment. And not only my own story, but the stories of all throughout the ages. The great cloud of witnesses.
(a more macabre thought exercise, relevant to accepting death as reality, in which I have occasionally participated, is to imagine how I will look five minutes before I die. Fighting for breath in water? Peacefully watching scenery fly past the van window? Skeletal in a nursing home? Any time I invite a participant into this exercise, it is less than five minutes before they depart it.)
Related: What does the wish for “length of days and long life” mean? A friend and I have discussed this, how we once thought the phrases simply two ways of saying the same thing, and yet…the more securely in Christ we find ourselves, the longer our days can seem, in a good way. For there is now time for everything that we must do, inside each day. Faith takes this view: The time you have is enough.
Thanks for recommending that exercise – it’s unsettling but somehow brings peace at the same time.
Gideon I like your mind, and I will suggest a counterview. Is the man I knew I Jakarta who, before his death, had a tumour in his neck that was rapidly growing to be close to the size of his head, but who still had to work full time as a motorcycle taxi driver or starve, more or less up until he had seizures and died, supposed to enjoy the slipping away of everything? I say this because I think you’re basically right from a narrow perspective – and however unlikely it would have seemed 20 yrs ago, I may, by some strange ruthlessness that preserved me, be able to enjoy what you and Rabbi Heschel sense. But that is because, although from origins that I consider worse than an orphan, and although I have had my head kicked in literally, which isn’t such a big deal, and mentally, which is a much bigger deal, and became the being that would naturally result therefrom, I got the ticket to be born in the rich country. Well paid teachers went above and beyond to refill my broken bucket daily when I was a young person, although ultimately of course teachers lose cage fights against parents. I had unlikely good luck.
Then there’s most people who have average, like middle of the road, to be expected luck. I would not recall the jury on them just yet, but I’m sceptical they can have the oh-so-nice feelings daily. But I’m more interested in the people given the bad tickets, the 30-40 per cent of the human population.
In my view, the worm at the core of the apple does not give new meaning, spark and impetus to their lives – it only writes the permanency of injustice and their losing ticket in giant lettering in the sky every time they look up. In the older times their desperation could be exploited by the elites with the tradeoff of promises of latter-day rewards, but science has killed the consolation. Now we’re back to simpler and clearer waters – shut up, accept the salary I give you, or starve.
It’s a wonderful thing to almost be spat out the bottom of society, but not be, you get to be able to speak about and to the exploited horizontally rather than down.
Schopenhauer said, “The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don’t believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”
There’s no complete solution, traditional Christianity has been a part of the problem, not solution. Sure the older Christian tradition, to the extent it can be recovered from the book burning and suppression and the obsessive compulsive need to follow what a long chain of men have declared as truth and tradition, absolutely could provide a basis for supportive socialist communities. This could make things measurably better, but we’re still stuck with humans, and I think we’ve all outgrown utopias.