All through my life, I felt I would continuously get better at doing things. With practice, I’d improve in sports, or writing, carpentry, cooking⎼ whatever I set my mind and body to do. Maybe most of us feel this way. Practice improves performance. But this is no longer true for me, at least not with physical skills and activities.
And meanwhile, time, life can go by too fast. Aging is changing.
The older we get, the faster our days, weeks, lives seem to disappear behind us; or the speed at which our life passes is directly proportional to our age. This seems to be a syndrome that plagues all (or most?) of us as we age. Maybe we should call it the aging time syndrome.
I first heard about it in a college philosophy class. The professor said it was often used as an argument against the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent creator. How could a beneficent God allow time to speed up for us as we got closer to death?
Why it happens is not understood. Is it caused by a slowing down in our ability to process information so we can’t keep up with time passing? Or is it because aging means we have more memories of old moments to shorten our habitation of the new? I don’t know.
But the more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that what happens is not that the present goes by faster. We still have moments that can seem to last forever. What happens, I think, is that as we age, the past gets larger quicker. We look back and suddenly feel the day, the week, the decade⎼ they were here one moment, and too quickly, they’re gone.
Is this sense of the past getting larger quicker an inherited alarm clock? An inborn prompt that evolved to teach us to live the last years or moments we have left more fully?
Last night, I discovered new twists in an old exercise. At 3:30 am, after pain woke me up and I had trouble getting back to sleep, I decided to return to window watching, a practice I had begun earlier this year. But I changed it a bit and discovered new applications for it.
Instead of gazing out the window to simply notice the beauty of the world, I took a breath and then looked to see what before I might have missed. I asked the night what beauty is here that in recent times had eluded me? What had I never verbalized to myself or others, or never felt? Or: what can I perceive now because of what I had noticed before? I looked outside; then closed my eyes and visualized the scene in my mind. Then l opened my eyes and looked again.
This was similar to an art exercise taught years ago by psychologist Lawrence LeShan, and another by Zen teacher Meido Moore.
So, when I did the night-watching practice, even outside my rural home no stars were visible. Black holes the shape of trees, buildings, and hillsides stood silhouetted against a gray sky⎼ a massive gray cloud filled by moonlight, yet with no moon visible. And the darkness appeared to begin in close to myself and lessen as it spread out into the distance.
This viewing brought me out of the pain and worry. The more focused on the outline of the trees, buildings, and hillsides, the more my mind stopped racing ahead, to fill itself with worries, plans, or regrets ⎼ with a time other than this, a place other than here, an imagined ‘me’ other than everything. The more mind stopped racing, the more the sky became clear; the more the world came alive, and my life stopped disappearing into night.
We know everything is always changing. The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, said we can never step in the same river twice. But it’s not just the river but ourselves that are always different. When we’re not so lost in thoughts, we can feel this, feel how we’re always changing, but changing along with everything else; one universe, together.
We can’t stop change; but we can stop racing away from being present with it. If we stopped racing, we might stop dreading and expending energy fighting it, fighting ourselves, and aging ourselves more quickly.
So, focusing on the world outside my window with the intent to simply observe; to notice the beauty, notice the changes, changed my pain, and worry, and my response to both. They became small details in a vast world outlined by clouds of moonlight.
And the feeling that we can get, especially as we become older, of the world racing ahead; that our lives, time, were going too fast⎼ that stops, for a moment. Or at least it slows, as also happens in meditation, nature walks and such, creating art, joyful encounters. And we can go back to bed and rest as the whole universe resting.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
