time.

cream in the coffee. from Sarah Nadine Arsenault on Vimeo.

Part of my goal list for the next 4 months includes a reading list.  I've been captivated with some of the intriguing facts found in "Moonwalking With Einstein"...especially pertaining to time.

Since I became an adult, it seems like someone is always telling me that time is only getting faster, and that it will only continue to do so.  After having Judah, I started wondering if Matt was changing the clocks to get me to go to bed earlier.  How can it already be time for bed?  Even now, I find myself asking: Where has the time gone?  It has already been 7 months since he was born!  How?

All I can picture is this snowball of time that gets faster and more reckless as it tumbles down the hill.  But once it hits the bottom, it just breaks apart.  At that point, no one is judging the speed anymore, they are just noticing that the snowball's time is done.

Ok, maybe a bit morbid, but essentially, it is what we keep telling ourselves time is - an increasingly fast moving snowball.

There is definitely a truth in how we feel like time is occurring (relativity speaking), but truthfully, time doesn't/can't change for an individual at any age.

"Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older."

Remember being a kid on summer vacation and not knowing what day it was?!  Or thinking that you literally waited an eternity at the hairdresser's for your mom to get her hair done?  Dreaming about what you would do when you were an adult, when you were in charge of your time?!  William James (Principles of Psychology) explains this curious time-warp perception: "In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day.  Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long drawn-out....But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse."

"Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it...Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives."

We need to make day-to-day memories, change up our schedules, take vacations, create as many new mental polaroids to engrain into our memories.  Those first few months of being a mom, every day was exactly the same and one day just morphed into the next because there were no new memories being made (side note: becoming a new mom is a new memory in itself...I'm not being hard on myself, but merely using it s an example and realizing this is why that time felt like such a blur.).  

Even if it is one thing a day that I mix up, I need to make each day momentous to "stretch" my time and make it worth living through.  I need to be creative, be open, be flexible with it.  I'm so excited with this new perspective, that I don't need to live my life believing that time only runs away and gets shorter...the challenge now: to live my life creatively & purposefully in the FULL amount of time given to me.

all quotes taken from Moonwalking With Einstein - Joshua Foer

pic pix: cream in the coffee > making time fun, May.2012