Time is relative.
“Time has no meaning when you’re in love.” ~ Unknown
One of Einstein’s greatest insights was that time is relative. It speeds up or slows down depending on how fast something is moving relative to something else. If you’re standing still and I’m flying by, time passes slower for me than for you (don’t ask).
Time also seems to speed up or slow down depending on what we experience relative to what we’ve experienced before. Time speeds up when our experiences are rote, when we’re standing still. But it slows down when we experience something new and exciting. When we’re flying high and engaging with the world.
I feel this effect whenever I travel. Time slows to a crawl. And when I return home it feels like I’ve been gone for weeks. It’s a strange and wonderful feeling, like when we were children.
Those beautiful summer days, when the air was alive with smells, and sounds, and color. There was so much to do and to experience and learn. No stone or frog was like any other. No day was like the one before, and they seemed to go on forever.
But now every Monday feels like any other Monday. To our desensitized minds nothing’s really new or exciting, and so our minds tune out and speed us along through life, like a stick flying down a spacious river.
If, like me, you want to slow it down, to stretch it out as far as it will go, then put some unexpected stuff in the way to bang up against your stick. Something new and surprising, an experience that will grab hold of your childlike mind, spin it round and round, and slow it way, way down.
Emerson wrote, “It is not the length of life, but the depth.”
Paradoxically, it’s the depth of your life, the diversity and quality of your experiences, that gives life its length.
Stay passionate!