A BBC report on Steven Taylor’s new book, Making Time, has what should be obvious advice:
- Avoid routine.
- Get intense.
- Get out of your comfort zone.
- Move
- Learn
Want to have more moments? Live intensely in as many as you can.
Taylor makes some interesting points about the nature of time, namely
that our perception of it is the reality. And he explains a bit why
time seems to go faster as we get older. It’s because we get accustomed
to our patterns and slow our intake of information.
Speeding the intake of new information is the key to making our lives
seem longer, Taylor says. So if you multitask, try doing it in
different ways, with different types of music and different types of
movies which create new memories.
I find that in my life memories are the best buttress against time. My
foreign trips, to Japan and England, are among the most intense
memories of my life, and those days are still vivid while whole years
have gone by without reference.
Kids are another way to make time stand still, again thanks to the
power of memory in bringing time back. While it does seem like "just
yesterday" since my daughter was tiny (she’s 19) I can bring those days
back in a heartbeat, with a song or a picture. The same with my 16-year
old son.
Unfortunately this is also true for hard times. I know there are hard
days in both their lives which they keep close and can’t forget, even
when they try. When you’re in a terrible accident, when you’re in a
war, when you’re in an intense competition, when you’re in "the zone,"
Taylor writes that time does seem to move more slowly, so in fact it
does move slowly.
Time, in other words, is relative. Time is composed of information, and
the intake of information. To slow time down, speed your intake of
information.
It’s something you can do at any age.
