It's About Time

Toward the end of a 2020 fundraising webinar, actress/comedian Amy Poehler declared, “Time is so 2019!” This was a funny and true statement that captured the zeitgeist of our past year of on-and-off sheltering-in-place. Many of us lost track of our time. The days ran together; weeks morphed into months. Too often, I’ve attributed a phone call or a task as having occurred in the past week when it happened months ago.

Losing track of time is disorienting for most of us in our time-obsessed culture. Confirming this obsession, a study commissioned by the Oxford English dictionary found that the word “time” is the most frequently used noun in the English language.

The Paradoxical Nature of Time

When we’re bored or experiencing pain or danger, we may feel time stand still. Our memory of that same period can be very different, however. We may view it as a “blip” on our screen of life. Conversely, when we are enjoying ourselves on vacation (remember those?), time seems to be fleeting but when we return to our everyday lives, we may feel as if we’ve been gone longer than the actual length of our trip.

This is what British author and lecturer, Claudia Hammond calls the “holiday paradox.” In her book, Time Warped: Unlocking the Secrets of Time Perception, Hammond explains that we experience time in two ways: in the moment and in retrospect.

The adage “time flies when you’re having fun” is only partly true. Without making memories, time flies whether we’re having fun or not. What makes time feel as if it’s not slipping away from us is novelty—new experiences. Such experiences are in short supply right now.

Our Anchors

Our routines are often what anchors us to time. We might complain about not having enough time, wasting time or running out of time as we move through our routines, but when those anchors were lifted last March, we likely felt unmoored.

Half of us didn’t need to be anywhere in the past year. Yes, we had to fire up our computers and, perhaps, stay focused during Zoom meetings or we needed to get the kids settled into their remote learning positions, but the anticipated coffee breaks, lunch meetings, classes, gym workouts, and after-work gatherings drifted away. Without our markers, how could we distinguish one hour from the next, one day from the next?

Scientists who have been studying time for, well, a very long time, tell us that time is in our heads—rather than being an absolute, time is relative. Physicists and spiritual leaders alike tell us time is an illusion.

Time may be an illusion and an artificial construct but we humans are remarkably good at marking time. If we promise to return a call in 5 minutes, the caller will notice if an hour or two elapses and we’ve missed the mark. Neurotypical adults have a sense of what a minute feels like versus the perception of an hour.

On the other hand, those with neurological disorders, such as dementia, often have a somewhat distorted sense of time. They may underestimate time because of the difficulty recalling short-term events. Absent short-term memory, our perceptions of time are greatly altered.

Neurological conditions aside, as we age, we may sense time passing more quickly. Hammond (and others who study time) believe that the lack of novel experiences creates this perception.

We might aspire to live in the present, like carefree babies and Zen monks, but our memories of the past and our hopes for the future keep us bound to time, even when our current conditions make time meaningless. Whether we’re being held captive or we’re vacationing on the Riviera, we want to know how much time has passed.

What’s the Rush?

The punchline of a joke an old friend often told has become a sort of mantra for our family. Here’s how it goes. A farmer from New York visits a farmer in Alabama. Every day the visitor watches as his host walks the pigs one-by-one to the river for water. This process takes the entire morning. Nearing the end of his visit, the New York farmer asks his host, “Why not take the pigs for watering in a group, instead of one-by-one? Wouldn’t this save a lot of time?” The host farmer replies, “What’s time to a pig?”

As we approach the one-year anniversary of staying home, I now relate to both the farmer and the pigs. What’s the rush?

We will all have memories of this pandemic period; we’ll tell our stories to anyone who will listen, although I doubt that many of us will call these the good old days. Our memories will include toilet paper shortages, mask-wearing arguments, needless worry over fomites, learning new words such as fomites, overusing words such as unprecedented and upended, Zoom fatigue and chasing down vaccines.

Will the time warp that defines this past year affect how we view time in the future? Only time will tell.

“The distinction between the past, present and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” 

~Albert Einstein