Children’s perception of time is relatively understudied. Learning to see time through their eyes may be fundamental to a happier human experience.
My household is absorbed in debate over when time goes the fastest or slowest.
“Slowest in the car!” yells my son.
“Never!” replies my daughter. “I’m too busy for time to go slow, but maybe on weekends when we are on the sofa watching movies.”
There’s some consensus too; they both agree that the days after Christmas and their birthdays dawdle by gloomily as it dawns on them they have to wait another 365 days to celebrate once more. Years seem to drag on endlessly at their age.
A year is a tenth of their entire life experience at 10 years old, and even longer the younger they are. A year is only a 60th of my life.
I’ve always felt it was a matter of how much you were learning or experiencing new things. When you’re very young, literally every second is streaming information into your brain that you’ve never seen, touched, tasted, done…etc.
Once we get life’s patterns down, once we learn what motions we need to go through to ensure our own survival, we also find them banal and literally start blanking them out of our minds while we think of other things, dream of that next new experience that may now be months or even years coming.
What we all miss is that those very motions are our lives. Every one of those seconds we just grind through is time. You wake up at the next experience you’ve been waiting for, smile wide, and then realize you’re 5 years older.
If you want to slow down time, actively seek out new things to do, no matter how small. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It isn’t.
Edit to say I’ve often thought about what it will be like when death is imminent. You know, people say you’ll never wish you worked harder on your deathbed? But I tell you what, I ‘may’ wish for some of those long weeks of ‘wishing my life would speed up just because I’m stuck at the office’ back.
Kinda makes every moment feel sweet for awhile, appreciating it, at least until you fall back into the old pattern.
I think it’s a scale issue. If you look at an analog clock and a small child, one second and the child are not that different in size. But an adult is much larger than the entire clock. Therefore, a year, that also is much larger than the clock, is out of scope for the small child, whereas a grow person can barely even see a second because they’re so small and you also usually get impaired vision with age.
No work, no bills, less responsibilities, minimal social pressure to be busy. Capitalism makes our experience of our lives shorter as well as the actual duration.
