One thing that drove me crazy during the last 3 years was this intense distortion of time. I got the sense some of the people I interacted with had the same issue.
The isolation contributed for sure but as world events went from fast to slow to fast again, sometimes things felt either intolerably slow or moving way way too fast (like last week with Silicon Valley Bank and the subsequent dramatic bank failures).
I played a lot of classical music back in the day so the question in the back of my mind for my own sanity was, where the heck is the metronome for life in all of this? I want a steady beat!
This did it for me. Every night and every morning I came up with 2 diametrically opposite things:
“What am I avoiding that is inevitable?” This is a type of issue all of us face, something we try to ignore is coming but will come for sure. If you have a doctor’s appointment that you don’t want to face, it comes up quicker than we want. This type of issue tends to accelerate the internal notion of time as we don’t want to deal with it and things seem to move faster.
“What am I intensely looking forward to?” This makes the sense of time move dramatically slower. Think about being a kid, hours before Christmas presents are opened.
If these two aspects of your focus are roughly equal in impact, each day feels about the same. You just have to have these two primers before you start the day, and let the beat be consistent and guide you as you wander through the measures of life.
Thanks to the following for feedback on this post
- L.C.
- GPT4
