Time Bandits

There are those for whom time weighs heavily, like thick, humid air on a hot day, nothing of interest filling a void of boredom.  If you have ever been a child in Kansas, where summers can be so hot and slow, where the tempo of the cicadas' song noticeably extends with each hour spent on the river bank as you seek to capture the catfish that will never bite, then you know what I mean.

For others, time flashes by.  In our mid-life years, there is so much to do, so many tasks and chores, that the day is a vortex of activity leaving us exhausted at the end of the day, wondering "What happened? How could I be so busy and get nothing done?"

Then we become old.  Then so many aspects of our lives have a tendency to revert to the simpler and more dependent days when we were young.  We have less to do.  Time accelerates even more as we realize that every day becomes a larger proportion of the time we have left.  It has been posed that the reason time seems to accelerate as we get old is that we do not have the anticipation of the future that we had when we were younger.

We can change that perception, or not.  We can:

• let go of the hectic pace of our mid-life years and revert to what we thought were those boring days of youth, with nothing substantial to do, no pressing agenda, no drive;  
• or we can realize that what we remember as the lazy summer days of childhood were in fact filled with adventure, new experiences, new places to go and things to learn.  Before we sat on the river bank for what seemed like hours but were in fact only moments, we had ridden our bikes for two miles, cutting donuts on the sand-covered sidewalk in front of the library as we passed, then wading in Emma Creek to catch some crawdads to use as bait, and then building a small fire to roast the fish we knew we were about to catch, and open the hot can of beer that we found in the ditch across the road from Uncle Henry's farm, but pouring it on the fire when we realized that how hot beer, any beer, at age 10 tastes awful.  And all that and more in one gloriously long summer day.

My point is this:  As children, there was so much NEW to experience.  Life moved slowly because we were always looking forward to something new.  Tomorrow lets collect cans and bottles from the ditch and maybe we will find something else amazing.  Will Christmas never come?  Will I ever be old enough to drive?  When I am 18, boy, then, ..............  Just WAIT until I am 21.  Looking to the future slowed time.  This is an immutable but as-yet inadequately documented law of physics (it also changes brain activity patterns). Why would we not want to follow that model?

The old joke is that boredom does not make you live longer, but makes it seem longer.  Boredom might make NOW seem to last forever, thus extending life.  But waiting for something NEW, some pleasurable and exciting FUTURE, will slow life to crawl.  Looking forward - next week, next month, next year - forces NOW and THEN out of our minds.  In looking back, an extended series of boring NOW's will seem to have gone in a flash, because there was nothing THEN to remember.  But waiting for exciting FUTURES's, with all the attendant anticipation, will take forever, because there is always something THERE that is not yet NOW.  And looking back at past FUTURE's will be so full of activity and interest, that it will seem like we are still THERE.

I have often said that I enjoy what I do for a living, and that if I ever retire, why would I want to stop doing something I like, in order to do nothing, which I do not like.  My challenge will be to find new things that I enjoy to anticipate.  After all, the attributes of work that I enjoy are action, learning, thinking, talking.  It is not the WORK that I enjoy, it is LIFE that I enjoy.  I can easily find new things to do.

Michael