How much time do you have left? Not as much as you think you do . . .

“Ok, let me see if I’ve got this straight. In order to be grounded, I’ve got to be crazy. And I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I’m not crazy anymore, and I have to keep flying.” – Catch 22

 

Now 205 pounds and doing 180 push-ups and sit-ups a day . . . .

When I was 10, summer lasted a year.  I would spend the time hiking in the mountains, making models (plastic spaceships, not the Donald Trump kind), reading comic books (sometimes the same ones, again and again) and looking forward to the next day.  Each day was a bit of wonder, and they lasted so very long.  It seemed like the longest days were those when we were wishing that the calendar would go forward – for a vacation – for a trip – for a birthday.  Our life went slowest when we were wishing it away.

When I was 30, summers began to blend together into a blur.  Time for the mortgage payment . . . again?  Didn’t I just pay that?  I’ll change the filter in the air conditioner.  Oh, that’s been a year?  No, two years???  How did that happen?

When I was 5, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas was roughly . . . forever.  Now?  A blink and then it’s done.  And after 30?  Might as well spin the wheel – days blur into weeks into months into years.  A decade between visits with a close friend?  Hmmm.

A clock ticks off a minute after a minute.  It ticks off an hour in an hour.  That linear time is 1+1=2.  It’s how we think of the world, but it’s not at all how we experience it.  No.  Our time sense is far different.

When we are born, after living that first day – it’s all we have ever known.  It’s an eternity.  It’s literally all the time we’ve ever known.  To look forward after that day would be to look across a gulf of time that, to us, is nearly an infinite amount of time away.

A minute isn’t a minute.  When you’re ten years old, half of your life is five years.  When you’re forty, five years the amount of time you’ve been thinking about changing your shower curtain.  But half of your life is twenty years, and that’s something substantial to you.  Kind of like the five years to the ten year old . . . .

All of us experience time a day at a time, but the day is different to each of us, has different significance, different meaning.  Your time sense is changed by the amount of time you’ve spent on Earth.  The most significant time is doubling . . . rather than a year, it’s all about how many times you’ve doubled your experience.  Let’s take an example:

Most people don’t start building memories until they’re two and a half or so.  Double it?  Five.  Again?  10.  20.  40.  80.

Viewed from that vantage point, we’ve only got about five doublings in our life.  Rather than 80 years (which seems daunting) think about it that the time between five and 10 will roughly correspond to the perceived duration between ages 40 and 80.

And I think it’s not just time perception – it’s learning.  It’s achievement.  You probably learn as much between two and a half and five as you do between 10 and 20.  Or 40 and 80.

Does time seem like it’s going faster?  For you it is.  This is the same model that radioactive decay follows – a half-life.  The half-life of a radioactive atom is based upon the stability of its nucleus.  Your half-life is based on how many days you have lived.  And each day makes the next day shorter . . . .

Fortunately, there’s a solution.  When reading Joseph Heller’s book, Catch: 22, one of the characters, Dunbar, shot skeet because he hated shooting skeet.  Whenever possible he did things he hated or things that made him uncomfortable so that he could have a life that appeared to be longer.  I mean, nothing seems longer than doing something you hate, so why not just fill your life with doing things you hate?

Oh, we don’t fill our lives with doing things we hate because it’s stupid.  Whew.  Forgot.

I’ll throw out there, that when viewed in these doublings, you have much less useful time on Earth than you think.  If you have five doublings (and nobody has ever made it to six) than you’ve only got so much time to do what you want to do.

Have a book to write?  If you haven’t started, will you ever?

Have an apology to make?  If you wait another decade, will that make it easier?

Whatever you do, don’t wish your life away – you’ve only got so many days.  Make the most of each one of them.