Did you ever notice?

Ever notice how when someone dreams of happiness, abundance, health, romance, or friendship, they never have to wonder if it's in their best interest? 

But when someone dreams of a specific house, employer, love interest, deadline, dollar amount, or diet fad, they often end up contradicting themselves?

Keep your "end results" general. Everything else is just a how. 

To the big picture!

Is your sense of time speeding up?

If you’re like me, someone who always has an over full schedule, you probably feel like the days just fly by. It seems like it just turned 2014 and we’re already 90% of the way through the year. 

This sense of time speeding up appears to be a phenomenon that progresses as we age.

As a child it seemed like Christmas would never come, and the school year would never end.  

There is  a psychological explanation for why this happens. Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D. says in his article in Psychology Today, “while there are a number of theories, the best explanation is that novel experiences seem to slow time perception down. Repetition of events seems to make them go faster. As a child, who has experienced few Christmases, each one brings anticipation and a certain novelty. For the parents (and especially the grandparents), it’s all too familiar – the same old, same old.”

“Here’s another example: The first time you drive to a distant locale, it seems like it takes forever (remember that first weekend getaway, or commuting trip the first day of the new job?). As you repeat the drive, over and over, the time flies by, and you can’t recall any specific trip, unless something “memorable” happens. A really long traffic jam; a fender bender; etc. Or, the first day of a two-week beach side vacation seems to go on and on, a long, and enjoyable experience (“Wow, I've got two whole weeks of this!”). But before you know it, you’re packing for home”

It appears that the familiar makes time go faster. Unique and memorable events slow time down.

So to slow down our life, to enjoy our days more, we want to slow down our sense of time. The longer we live the more we have created a comfort zone and we tend to stay within that. In her blog article, 8 Steps to Break Out of Your Comfort Zone, Kathy Sporre says “comfort zones develop slowly – almost imperceptibly. 

Soon the air in the comfort zone gets stale, the flow of life begins to stagnate, and personal growth comes to a gradual halt. In some cases, personal growth can even shift into reverse.” Kathy offers eight steps to break out of your comfort zone. In summary she suggests the following:

-        Reconnect with your spiritual side of life in whatever way you find fulfilling

-        Volunteer to help your favorite charity or cause

-        Get physical and feel stronger

-        Be a friend. Do things together and for each other

-        Open the door and go outside

-        Listen to your feelings and share them with a trusted friend or relative

-        Stretch your intellectual muscle by  learning something new

-        Let your innate creativity flow out of your calling.

She explains each of these in more detail in her article.

Breaking the routine is the key to slowing time. Plan for special activities, meet new people, host a party or other event that will bring people together. When you’re in planning mode you’re dealing with something new; you’re forcing your brain to adjust.

According to Alan Henry, author of The Science of Your “Comfort Zone,” and Why It’s So Hard to Leave It, “your comfort zone is a behavioral space where your activities and behaviors fit a routine and pattern that minimizes stress and risk. It provides a state of mental security. You benefit in obvious ways: regular happiness, low anxiety, and reduced stress.”

“In leaving your comfort zone, the experiences you have may be mind-blowing or regrettable, but that doesn’t matter. The point is that you’re doing it, and you’re pushing yourself past the mental blocks that tell you to do nothing.”

If you want to slow down the passage of time in your life, think about what you can do differently to break out of your comfort zone. You’ll not only slow down your days, you’ll find life will become much more interesting when you try new things.

Time Passages

Time Passages and time perception raise a number of intriguing puzzles, including what it means to say we perceive time

Book XI of the Confessions of St. Augustine contains a long and fascinating exploration of time, and its relation to God. During the course of his exploration, Augustine raises the following conundrum: when we say that an event or interval of time is short or long, what is it that is being described as of short or long duration?

It cannot be what is past, since that has ceased to be, and what is non-existent cannot presently have any properties, such as being long. But neither can it be what is present, for the present has no duration. 

Augustine's answer to this riddle is that what we are measuring, when we measure the duration of an event or interval of time, is in the memory. From this he derives the radical conclusion that past and future exist only in the mind. Science today tells us that Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate experimentally.

Try this exercise: Go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you're looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here's the kicker: you never see your eyes move. What is happening to the time gaps during which your eyes are moving? Why do you feel as though there is no break in time while you're changing your eye position? (Remember that it's easy to detect someone else's eyes moving, so the answer cannot be that eye movements are too fast to see.)

Time and memory are tightly linked. In a critical situation, a walnut-size area of the brain called the amygdala kicks into high gear, commandeering the resources of the rest of the brain and forcing everything to attend to the situation at hand. When the amygdala gets involved, memories are laid down by a secondary memory system, providing the later flashbulb memories of post- traumatic stress disorder. So in a dire situation, your brain may lay down memories in a way that makes them "stick" better. Upon replay, the higher density of data would make the event appear to last longer. This may be why time seems to speed up as you age: you develop more compressed representations of events, and the memories to be read out are correspondingly impoverished. When you are a child, and everything is novel, the richness of the memory gives the impression of increased time passage—for example, when looking back at the end of a childhood summer.

So even though we may believe that time is slowing down for us as Boomers, it is not, our perception of time is changing and since time is a function of the brain, we can control how we view time. This I think gives us an advantage as we age as we no longer are bound to the idea of a 9 to 5 workday. So I suggest that rather than be a slave to time or the passage of time, we should use our knowledge of time and time passage to maximize our enjoyment of life and to enhance our relations with others.

Summer Time and time to procrastinate

Procrastination pervades every aspect of our lives.  And we’ve mastered it to perfection having learned a subtle form of it when we were babies.   


We delayed falling asleep because our mothers wouldn’t cradle us in her arms.  We’ve procrastinated in performing our duties at home, in school, in the work place, and in our most fragile human relationships.  We shudder to think what the final tally of lost hours will be because we procrastinated habitually.


But as one writer said, not procrastinating will make us appreciate the life we have now.  And as we build on the small steps, we’d be amazed at how much we can accomplish over the years.


As we spend these hazy days of summer relaxing perhaps we should ask ourself, “In what ways do I procrastinate?”  Sit down with pen and paper.  Writing them will help you focus and identify them more clearly.  Here are some ways where people procrastinate:

• paying bills
• not discussing the complaints you’ve received about a member of your team for fear of hurting his/her feelings
• repeatedly postponing a dental appointment because you’ve got better things to do
• not returning the call of your son’s teacher because you know what the problem is and you’re fed up
• not discussing your resentment about your husband/wife/significant other spending too much time at work or with his or her buddies
• not getting that hair cut, that dress dry-cleaned, that donation mailed
• not visiting a sick relative in the hospital
• not telling your significant other you no longer love her/him
• not calling your doctor about that persistent numbness in your right arm or not fixing a colonoscopy exam date
• not having the car’s squeaking brakes checked
• not going to confession because you never know what the priest’s schedule is
• not sending that overdue thank you note or making that overdue call to your mother-in-law

Once in awhile you’ll deviate from your intentions.  You’re a human being with limitations, or else life, without warning, takes a detour, and we get derailed. 

Let’s take a lesson from our brothers and sisters in the east who live by mantras that they recite to themselves every day. 

Here’s one you can recite in the morning as you wake up:  “I will not procrastinate today.  It is unproductive.  I have tasks to do, and I will write them down so I can decide which of them need to be done by 12 noon.  My goal is to finish at least 2 big tasks and 2 small ones or I can sit and relax in the sun.

Time in a bottle

I have been thnking about time as I move closer to the end of my contract. For some of us we view the world in positive future time. We look forward to events, planning them anticipating them savoring them and being excited about things that will happen to us we feel in control as we move to the future. Others view the world in negative future time, we dread tomorrow, the events that will happen are going to be nasty, we feel out of control as we plunge into the dark hole that is the futue.

Others of us view our world through the past, we build our life on what we have done, as Springsteen says "Our glory days" shape our present as we think about times past and past glories.

Others live in the present and do not plan for the future nor dwell in the past. Time and the passage of time is a function of our mind and we control how we view time. Future orientation may mean giving up the joys of the present to future hopes and dreams, which may or may not come true. Living in the past may mean that we miss out on chances to create more glory days. Living in the present means not planning for our future and maybe putting our security at risk.

Some songs that focus on time are:

       ·        Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce

·        Time Passages

·        SyncopatedClock

·        Time after Time

·        Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?

·        Till the End of Time

·        Summertime

·        Time  on my Hands

·        Time

·        Wings of Peace

·        One Day at a Time

·        If Tomorrow Never Comes

·        25 or 6 to 4

·        For evera nd Ever, Amen

·        Time Stands Still

·        Time Marches On

·        As Time Goes By

·        ToE verything there is a Season (Turn, Turn, Turn)

·        Till the End of Time

·        Hazy Shade of Winter

·        Somewhere in Time

·        Yesterday

·        Rock Around the Clock

·        Yesterday, When I was Young

·        Killing Time

·        A New Day has Come

·        No Time