Most people agree that diet, exercise, and planning for your health needs lead to a long life. Sudoku and puzzles are often mentioned in that same breath. What if it were something a little less tangible, and no less approachable, than eating broccoli every day of our lives?
When I was a three-year-old, I called out to my mother, “Let me run to you.” I pushed and ran as fast as possible into her strong arms. As a teen, my speed added to my trophy case. I’m a grown up now and unsure I want to travel at such high speeds toward the end of my life. How can I slow down the passage of time?
By altering our mindset around it.
Time and How it Moves
According to author and speaker Alain de Botton, in his book, The School of Life, “Our subjective experience of time bears precious little relation to the way we like to measure it on a clock. Time moves more or less slowly according to the vagaries of the human mind: it may fly or it may drag; it may evaporate into airy nothing or achieve enduring density.”
Youngsters are often bored, watching the clock at school. We age and time appears in the rearview mirror. Lately, I’ve noticed how the days fly by. The holidays arrive unannounced. However, each hour in a day, regardless of whether light is in short supply or not, drag on. From four to five o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon feels as long as last week.
The modern-day philosopher, de Botton, suggests we learn how to densify time. “If the goal
is to have a longer life, whatever the dieticians may urge, it would seem that the priority should be not to add raw increments of time but to ensure that whatever years remain feel appropriately substantial. The aim should be to densify time rather than to try to extract one or two more years from the grip of Death.”
How do we achieve this?
What are his suggestions to achieve this? Undertake new, challenging or exciting endeavors. Living in the city, I am exposed to a wide variety of music and sporting events, and the vagaries of urban living that include debates with friends over issues such as taxation, housing, development, and governmental oversight. Here, there’s a wide variety of cultures that also come together to offer their style of food and celebratory traditions. If we choose, we could attend a free lecture on sustainability one night, and a concert with the Red Hot Chili Peppers the next.
At many poetry readings I attend, a woman with multiple sclerosis and older gentleman whose cat died after his wife died recite their poetry in front of a younger generation of spoken word poets. They are densifying their life.
Other ideas on how to densify our life include living consciously. Before dawn, my husband leaves for work at a hospital that sits atop one high mounts in our city. Many mornings, he is greeted with a spectacular sunrise. I’m a recipient of his pictures of the scene. We are both noticing, in that hour when most of us struggle to engage. And we are connecting. We make a nightly stroll around the city’s famous Washington Park. In the past, we’ve witnessed random fireworks, the various stages of the moon, or a city completely shut down with exception of our feet swishing through snow.
The little moments matter most. Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet, wrote, “It is not the length of life, but the depth of life.” Densify time.
We might marvel at super-agers, individuals who live to be 104. They might be living deep and meaningful lives. We can also marvel at someone like my father, who overcame the loss of his vocation at age 65, started over, and achieved more than he had dreamed when working in the family business. And he never sat still with his myriad hobbies of gardening, stamp collecting, train collecting, and collecting grandchildren. He had densified his life.
Even in rushed seasons, we can all add a little depth to our time and not rush toward the end.