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I have often felt like life is simply passing by too fast. Throughout my time at Lawrence, I’ve largely felt like the first few days of each term last a few months or so each, and then the rest of the term could fit comfortably into a week or two. I think Covid only worsened this phenomenon overall, as days spent barely leaving my dorm or on Zoom still distort my sense of time passing, but that the busyness of life at Lawrence, which has hardly changed over the past four years, hasn’t helped either.
As a conservatory student who spends much of his time underground in windowless, artificially-lit rooms, the sensation of walking over to the conservatory in broad daylight and leaving in pitch darkness has grown common, but still never feels quite right. Even in that time, because I’m spending it doing things I really love but also find really difficult, at times working feels like banging my head against the wall for hours when really, only 25 minutes have passed, and sometimes I get so engrossed in whatever I’m doing that 25 minutes of playing actually took so long that the Commons closed while I was working.
I’m also familiar with the theory that time seems to pass faster the older you get and wish someone had told me about it when I was five years old. The idea is that when you’re three years old, everything feels like it takes forever because one year is an entire third of the time you’ve been alive; by the time you reach 20, or 40, or 65, a year takes up a smaller and smaller slice of the pie chart of your life, so relative to the years when you were younger things seem to take up less time and go by faster. I can appreciate the irony that you can only really appreciate this experience in retrospect, but it doesn’t solve my problem that I’m only 20 and still, it’s all happening far too fast.
In the face of this, I often joke that I’m here for a good time, not a long time. It’s a great way to justify procrastinating a paper (or Op-Ed) for one more day, or staying out just a few more hours on the weekend. Still, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced it might also just be true.
I have occasionally fallen victim to the terrible myth that I should “take care of myself” by working out, and meditating and trying to focus in long, boring classes and other things like that. I agree that they make my life longer. The only caveat is that they don’t lengthen my life by making me healthier and more mindful, reducing my risk of heart disease and depression, they make it longer because the longest minute I’ve ever spent in my life is a minute I’ve spent planking. Have you ever set a timer to try to meditate? I occasionally try to clear my mind after a stressful day by setting a timer for five or ten minutes and sitting peacefully with my consciousness, and I swear I can feel my skin wrinkle as the years go by with me sitting there.
It’s even worse in class. I love my major and classes but sometimes you’re just not in the mood, or aren’t interested in the topic at hand, and the clock slows down more and more the closer it creeps to the class ending. How cruel! What a sad, bleak existence it is to be faced with the choice between fleeting joy and pleasure, or a miserable, boring trudge through temporal molasses.
And to make matters worse, it’s not as though the clock stops to give you a moment to mull over how you’d like to spend your days. Even as I write this, the minutes creep by through moments of awkward prose, and fly away as I gain momentum. Surely there’s some ideal ratio where my perception of good experience equals or betters my perception of un-ideal experience, but it would surely require so much more good experience than bad that it’s unlikely I’d even be able to live it for very long.
I suppose it could be worse. The clock speeds up at the sight of the snooze button on my alarm being pressed, but also the minute I’m due to walk on stage for my recital, or an hour before an assignment I procrastinated is due on Canvas. Time passes faster, still, when I need it most, when I’m just not ready.
One approach has been to set myself little reminders that time is going by. I set alarms on my phone when I practice and have a timer on TikTok to remind me not to let too many minutes slip by, wasted in the careless enjoyment of idle entertainment. If my life is going to pass me by, at least I should be able to look back and say that I enjoyed it and was productive. Breaking the trance of focus to appreciate the time it used up as though it were limitless is a small price to pay for a long life, lived well. And yes, I also occasionally plank, and meditate and sit through two-hour lectures. And life is long – really long – if I’m lucky I’ll be around another 60 to 80 years, maybe longer with modern medicine and such. All the same, maybe COVID-24 will do me in, or maybe the microplastics will fill my body with previously unknown toxins sooner rather than later. Even if it’s the former, all my alarms and reminders and discomforts can’t help me shake the feeling that there’s just not enough time, and that what I have is slipping away too fast.
Not that complaning about it helps; the seconds keep ticking, whether the sentences are long or short. That’s just the thing, isn’t it.