When I was a kid, the holidays seemed to take FOREVER to get here. Now, as an adult, I am amazed the holiday season has hit again so quickly — didn’t we just have them? Jack Rooney said it perfectly. Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.
When you are younger, time goes very slowly. But then, you start having to be responsible for your life, and that’s when the days, weeks, and months begin to blow by. One day, you pass by a mirror and don’t see yourself anymore. As the old saying says: life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. Life isn’t exactly short. Instead, life gets in the way, and before you know it, decades have gone by.
Another reason life goes faster the older we get is that we have most of our ‘firsts’ early on. The first time you do something is usually the most memorable and leaves an impression. Later experiences aren’t necessarily better, worse, or less meaningful, but the ‘firsts’ leave a strong, lasting impression — feeling like a core memory or significant life event. Later on, experiences are repeated, feeling like a blur. Thus, you don’t remember those experiences as clearly regarding their impact on your life or how you define yourself.
From a mathematical perspective, time goes faster the older you are because a day takes up less and less of your life. So, for a child, a day is perhaps 1/3500 of their experience, but as an adult, a day is only 1/10000 of it. Looking back at my childhood memories, I truly understand how fast time flies. Memories from a decade ago feel like they are from a different lifetime almost. Yet, they also feel like they just happened. Then looking forward, I think about how much time there is, which at first glance seems like a lot.
When I look back at how fast life has gone and how it seems like time is speeding up as I age, I know time will go exponentially quicker as I have more and more years behind me. Think about it: one year compared to ten years is a lot, but one year compared to fifty years… that’s five times less.
I had the epiphany a while back that our single most valuable asset in life is time. Time is the only thing you’re guaranteed to run out of, and you have no idea how much you have left. Throughout a lifetime, you can collect all sorts of things, such as money, cars, baseball cards, or stamps. But nobody has ever been able to collect time. We can only lose it and never save or ever get it back.
Seen through this lens, drop a routine-and-safe-life in exchange for opportunities to seek out new experiences and challenges. You want to be in a…
