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It is already the end of June, and I find myself asking the same question I seem to ask more often with each passing year: how did that happen so quickly?
Wasn’t Memorial Day just here? Didn’t summer just begin? One moment we are looking forward to the warmer weather, longer days, and a little more breathing room, and the next moment June is almost gone and July is standing at the door. Teachers have a way of putting it that stays with me: June is Friday night, July is Saturday night, and August is Sunday night. You can almost feel the weekend ending before it has really begun.
I remember being a kid, riding a city bus to middle school in the dead of winter. I turned to my friends and said, “I can’t wait until summer vacation.” An older woman sitting nearby overheard me and said, “Sonny, don’t wish your life away.” I had no idea what she meant then. I think about her often now.
There is something about getting older that makes time feel less like it is passing and more like it is slipping through our fingers. And when that feeling hits, the Automatic Brain (AB) does what it often does. It reacts. It wants to grab hold of the clock and say, slow down. It wants to negotiate with time, bargain with it, control it. The AB does not like anything that feels like loss, and the passing of time can feel like the greatest loss of all because there is no argument we can win against it.
So maybe the question is not whether we can make time slow down. Maybe the better question is why it feels so fast in the first place.
I remember noticing this in medical school. I could sit through one lecture that lasted an hour, and it felt as if I had been trapped there for half a day. Then I could sit through another lecture of the exact same duration, and somehow it seemed to pass in minutes. Same room. Same clock. Same sixty minutes. Completely different experience.
That stayed with me because it made something obvious. Time may be measured by the clock, but it is experienced by the mind. The clock is consistent. Our experience of it is not.
When we are bored, uncomfortable, or waiting for something to be over, time can feel painfully slow. The AB is scanning for the exit. But when we are engaged, curious, absorbed, or moved by something, we stop measuring the moment because we are actually living inside it. Then something even stranger happens. The boring hour may have dragged while we were in it, but it leaves almost no memory behind. The meaningful hour may have flown by, but it stays with us.
As we get older, there are a few reasons time seems to speed up. One is that life contains fewer firsts. Childhood is filled with novelty — first day of school, first bike, first best friend, first victory, first real disappointment. The brain marks novelty as a reference point. It says, this is different, remember this. But as we age, more of our days begin to resemble other days. We wake up in the same place, drive the same roads, have many of the same conversations, and check the same phone far too many times. Routine can be comforting, but it is not always memorable. The days begin to blur together, not because they were meaningless, but because we were not fully there to mark them.
Another reason is that each year becomes a smaller portion of our life. When we are five, one year represents twenty percent of everything we have ever known. At sixty, that same year is roughly two percent. The clock hasn’t changed, but our relationship to it has. The math changes, and the feeling changes with it.
Then there is attention, which may be the biggest part of all. We are rarely only where we are. We are in the room, but we are also in tomorrow’s problem. We are at dinner, but thinking about an email. We are with someone we love, but part of us is somewhere else entirely. The present moment cannot leave a deep imprint if we only skim across the surface of it.
So can we make time slow down? Not the clock. The clock is going to do what the clock does. But I do think we can slow down our experience of being alive.
We can seek out the unfamiliar — take a different road, visit a place nearby we have somehow never seen, call someone instead of texting. We can create memory markers — write down one thing from the day, notice the smell of summer rain, the sound of birds in the morning, the look on someone’s face when they laugh without holding anything back. And perhaps most importantly, we can stop rushing through the very things we claim to value. The AB is always pulling us forward — what is next, what needs fixing, what might go wrong. The Mind brings us back. Not perfectly. Not permanently. But enough to say, this moment counts too.
Because it does.
A conversation with your child counts. A quiet cup of coffee counts. The hand of someone you love resting in yours counts. The ordinary dinner at the ordinary table on an ordinary night may one day become the memory you would give anything to return to.
That is the part we forget. We keep waiting for the big moments to announce that we are alive, but most of life is not made of big moments. It is made of small ones we either notice or miss.
Our life here is brief. A blink. A breath. A small spark in the vastness of time. That thought can feel frightening if we let the AB take hold of it. But perhaps the brevity of life is not meant only to scare us. Perhaps it is meant to wake us.
Maybe time feels faster as we get older because life is quietly asking us to pay closer attention. Not to cling. Not to panic. Not to mourn every passing month before it is even gone. But to live with our eyes open.
June is ending. Summer is already moving. Life is passing. All of that is true.
But today is still here.
And as long as we are alive, we have the chance to stop, breathe, notice, love, forgive, laugh, listen, and live this day with a little more presence than yesterday. We may not be able to slow the clock, but we can stop letting life pass unnoticed.