Eternity in an hour

15 February 2016

Like most children, I felt like I had to wait an eternity for Christmas to roll around. Like most adults, I feel like a year is nothing – they are all flying past at an increasing rate. This idea was a mystery to me for years until my mate, Kara, explained it to me in the clearest possible way. She said to me, when you were four years old and you had to wait a year for the next Christmas to come, you were waiting a quarter of the time you had been on this planet – 25% of my lifetime waiting! Whereas now, I’m only waiting 1/50th of my life. Seen from the other direction, if I had to wait 25% of my life for something to happen now, I would be waiting 12 years; if I were four and I only had to wait 1/50th of my life, I would only have to wait about 29 days.

What that says to me (apart from the fact that Kara is a genius) is that time is about perspective.

I’m sure you’ve felt it. Waiting for test results and it seems like 3 days equals 3 lifetimes. Being immersed in a task you love and time becomes irrelevant – it could be 3 days or 3 minutes but it doesn’t matter, time is simultaneously moving slow and fast. Our ideas of time are challenged by circumstance.

My circumstance has changed. Things I learned to do when I was young, like getting dressed, I’ve had to learn over again to accommodate changes. I would be quite sad if I spent a lot of time thinking about how much time it takes to get my shoes on or how little time it takes to flip out of the chair. Minutes are both an eternity and a flash and I am forever revising my estimates for getting ready to leave the house. By my latest reckoning, everything takes 1.5 times more time than I think it will.

Lucky for me, I’ve had an excellent time teacher for the past 9 years. I used to joke with Steve that his perception of time is different to everyone else. If he said he would be ready to leave the house in 10 minutes, I would ask “10 Steve minutes or 10 normal people minutes”. I learned not to let this frustrate me, but to let him be himself – there should always be time for that, shouldn’t there?

The secret to Steve’s successful ignorance of time can be found in the idea of ‘flow’. He has this amazing ability to engage in an activity to the point where time ceases to matter and I have a lot to learn about that (thanks to my focus on time, he describes the period of his life pre-me as ‘before time mattered’). Of course, this refers to tasks he enjoys or can at least lose himself in. It does not refer to untangling cords, a task that, by his perception takes about 20 years (our ‘normal people’ perception would find that about 5 minutes have passed). Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi came up with the term ‘flow’ and has a good TED talk about it. For me, he just could have called it “Be Like Steve”.

Since the debacle, I have discovered deep wells of patience I did not know I had. I have uncovered my own ways of finding enjoyment in the menial. I am learning to minimise the frustrating tasks (often by asking for help) and maximise the joyful ones. I can lose a day in a good book, or writing a letter to a friend, or taking my time in the kitchen to make something tasty. The challenge is to find moments in the menial that I can take pleasure in – small victories, noticeable progress, mental or physical fulfillment – and stretch them. Stretch them like crazy.