Hi everyone! I'm still quite sick, but got up to read some stuff online and thought I would post a couple of things. Hope everyone is having a wonderful Easter weekend!
timesonline.co.uk
Does your life go by too fast? Here's how to slow it down
Janice Turner
EVERY CHRISTMAS EVE from 1900 to 1942, a railway inspector called Richard Wagner photographed himself and his wife at home in Berlin. While the varying abundance of fare hints at history’s intrusion in their lives — in 1914 they enjoy cake and sausages, in food and fuel-rationed 1917 they stand before a bare table in overcoats — every Christmas looks otherwise just the same. Only the Wagners themselves, jowls drooping, lines deepening, show the passage of time from photo to photo, year to year.
Wagner’s impulse to record his domestic life was rare in his day. But I bet — like you — if I scrabbled around in dusty boxes I could assemble a sequence of the past 15 Christmases. That’s if I could work out the dates, since decades of cracker-pulling have merged into one brandy-butter blur.
The Wagner pictures are reprinted by Professor Douwe Draaisma in his erudite and playful book Why Life Speeds Up as you get Older: How Memory Shapes our Past. This sense that the years rotate ever faster once you hit 40 is a universal phenomenon and makes bores of us all. “Is it Easter already?”, you exclaim biddy-like in the post office. “I can’t believe my baby’s so grown-up,” you tell your squirming 9-year-old.
Draaisma’s explanation is that time appears to quicken or slow down according to the amount of memories we form. Weeks inched by when we were young because between the ages 15 to 25 we store more about our lives than during any subsequent period. This is partly because our brains are at their photographic peak, but mostly because young lives are full of unforgettable firsts: first holiday without parents, first drink, first job, first love . . .
With each passing year, the firsts diminish — first hot flush, first slipped disc, first redundancy cheque — we make fewer memories and consequently time zips by unmarked. (Our children at least bestow us vicarious pleasure in their firsts.) This is compounded by the lazy middle-aged impulse to live by familiar routines that make life easier and more comfortable, but forge few memories.
Reading Draaisma’s book leaves me wondering if our modern obsession with striving to live longer through monotonous exercise and diet regimes is hugely misguided. Perhaps instead, we should try to make our lives feel longer by working to lay down more new memories. We should avoid what William James, the 19th-century psychologist, called “hollow” years, which — like a prison sentence or a long illness — feel achingly slow when you are living them but on later reflection seem to have gone in a blink. Instead, ideally, time should pass like a good holiday: the days fly while you are there, but on returning home you feel you’ve been gone an age.
And so a-memory-making we must go, digging ourselves out of grooves, abandoning the safe and known for the effortful and new. Renting that lovely house in Tuscany, and inviting the same set of friends year after year, will make many summers contract into one. Sell your second home and your second set of time-stealing routines.
If we truly want time to stretch, perhaps life must be a perpetual, low-level mid-life crisis. Not ditching spouse and Espace for lover and Lamborghini. But it wouldn’t hurt to add a new friend (so rarely made after 40) and a bicycle. And we should show respect, not disdain, for those earnest retired folk you see on Italian cookery courses or watercolour holidays. I realised, taking riding lessons on a dude ranch in Arizona last month, that it was years since I’d properly learnt a new skill. And that five days sure lasted, as did the weals on my butt.
However, Draaisma cautions, we may not choose to absorb all our exciting new material. Indeed with advancing age the “reminiscence effect” sets in: we store less and reflect more on what is already there. And as our many internal biological clocks — our metabolism, pulse, cell division and so on — wind down, so time appears to pull away. Yet if we cannot slow time itself, at least there must be better ways of spending it than Christmas at the Wagners.
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