THE FACT OF THE MATTER
BY PAUL HOPKINS
It seems like it was only yesterday that I wrote in this column… Where did that year go, with a new one upon us? Now, here I am again, wondering where the last 12 months went. I may not be any the wiser, but I am, unfortunately, another year older and it seems, with each passing year, time flies at an alarming pace.
My wonderful daughter said to me once, regarding some topic or other, “You know, Dad, in three years’ time I will be 40!” And I said, “You know, Niamh, I was 40 only yesterday.”
Of course, I was 40 a score and more years ago: it just seems like yesterday. And if you, dear reader, are of similar vintage, you will know exactly what I mean.
When you are young, time passes quite slowly. Each birthday is a monumental occasion. Those long, lazy summers of childhood seem to never end. We perhaps remember trying to make the clock hands move faster with our minds as we sat bored in class. But as we grow older, life seems to speed up.
Birthdays we’d sooner forget about, rather not notice them, as we feel like we’re hurtling towards old age. Why does it feel like this? Is time really moving faster somehow?
From the University of Kansas comes a study to understand this phenomenon of time going faster as we get older. Scientists tested this theory, first proposed by the contemporary physicist and philosopher Douglas Hofstadter, that time appears to speed up because we start grouping distinct individual experiences into larger “chunks”, like all our Christmases into one.
When we are young, we have many big moments, experienced for the very first time. So going to a park can be quite a big deal, with many memorable sensations experienced. But as we grow older, going to that park offers fewer and fewer new experiences. So, we start collapsing them into memory “chunks”, putting everything that happened simply under “a walk in the park”, in effect making that particular span of time feel brief. At least that’s Hofstadter’s contention.
I recall a couple of years back reading a provocative essay in The Atlantic by the renowned American oncologist and bioethicist Dr Ezekiel Emanuel, entitled Why I Hope to Die at 75. Provocative, because the eminent scientist, now 69, has declared he will refuse medical interventions, antibiotics, and vaccinations once he turns 75.
The crux of his argument is that the older among us are living too long in a “disabled and diminished state of life”. He wants to make his friends and others think about how they want to live as they grow older. As he put it: “I want them to think of an alternative to succumbing to that slow constriction of activities and aspirations imperceptibly imposed by ageing.”
I am, like many, at the moment at least, opposed to this kind of thinking. And, anyway, Emanuel’s ideas may soon become obsolete — with many contemporary scientists believing we are on course to living up to 180 years old! (We are, in fact, still evolving, but that’s another day’s debate.)
Meantime, I endeavour to live life, each day, in the “moment”. A kind of mindfulness, if you like, which seems to be all the buzz at the moment. Living “in the moment” seems to allow me to appreciate such moments more fully, creating meaningful memories.
At the end of the day, these days, I find myself more often re-sensitised to the satisfaction of the simple things life offers. Spring was never so vibrant, but autumn does, most days, seem richly gold.
Increasingly, I find people are of abiding interest — observed on the street, overheard on the bus, down the pub of an evening.
Small pleasures have greater meaning now; that pint, the walk by the mill, my friend’s just-published book of essays, my daughter’s daily phone call…
In their own way, such simple things counteract life’s quickening pace.
At the end of the day, middle and old age, and the attainment of such, should be laudably embraced, for it is that time of life denied to so many throughout the world, for whom death comes calling early.
That I have lived another year is a miracle in itself. May your new year bring you all the good life has to offer.
Miracles, even…
