Slowing Down Time
The thing that I struggle with the most with getting older isn’t the gray hair (though that sucks, too), but just how quickly time is moving these days. Remember when you were a kid and December seemed soooo long? Summers would last forever. Now you blink and the holidays are over.
I remember talking with my dad about this once when I was younger. How a year seems to take so long when you’re five, because at that point it’s 20% of your life. But by the time you’re 50, a year is just 2% of your life.
Now that I am firmly in my mid-40’s, I am searching for practices and ways to slow down time. There is the obvious meditation, but I’m also trying out some new ones.
Morning Pages:
I started doing morning pages back around 1998 when I first bought The Artist’s Way (though I still haven’t finished that book! 2021?). And while I will never doubt that my days go better when I’ve spent 20-30 minutes journaling in the morning, one thing I notice is that often I’m still too tired and waiting to be caffeinated, so I don’t delve into subjects as much as I’d like. Also, I’m generally writing against the clock – either the need to wake Hannah up for school, or on the weekends when she’s going to wake up on her own. So I tend to rush through them, and they become one more thing on my to-do list, which I don’t love. Still, as I say, doing them is better than not doing them. And soon enough I’ll be in a season of life where my kiddo won’t want to snuggle me first thing in the morning anymore, and so I relish this time while I can.
The “being present” exercise:
This is simply an exercise I do each day where I spend time really focusing on what it is I’m doing. That means that for ten minutes while I’m chopping carrots for soup, for example, I’m just chopping the carrots. I notice everything about the carrot. The color, the texture, the crunchiness, the way the skin peels off. I’m not listening to my audiobook or NPR. I’m just chopping carrots. Getting really present to what I’m doing at least one time each day helps me notice more those important moments that I might slip over otherwise.
The Beautiful Moments Collection:
For years I’ve done a nightly gratitude list, but it’s generally a list of five things I’m grateful for, and they tend to repeat a lot. My health, my parents’ health, my family, my daughter’s health, our home, a reliable car, bubblebaths… that type of thing. So I’ve started digging deeper each day, and collecting the beautiful moments that happened that day, rather than simply a list of things I’m grateful for. So I’ll write about the way Hannah and I met a cat on a walk, and how gentle she was as she was meeting the cat, and how she blinked at the cat, and how the cat circled around her figuring out if she could be trusted. I’ll write about the way it felt to sink into a hot bath, and spend half an hour undisturbed with a book. I’ll write about the feeling of accomplishment at emptying out my inbox, or how my breath felt after a run. That kind of thing – the beautiful moments that often go unnoticed throughout the busy day. And writing about them helps me notice more of them.
So there we go – three things I am doing to help me slow down time, and be more present in everyday life. Because I’m not okay with a life in which I just buzz around from thing to thing to thing, never noticing what’s going on, and missing it all, and I’m not okay with how quickly time is moving these days!
