How do you encounter time?

This morning, Caroline looked for a photo to share with a friend in Germany in a long-neglected old Flickr account we used to maintain; we reveled in the old memories that seemed to fall out of ancient history. It turns out that this look into the past was last updated in 2017, so it is not quite all that ancient. So how did so much time seem to pass in only four years?

It’s all about the experiences we had in the interim. With a pandemic year obscuring just what else was done in those intervening years, I had to check on what’s what. I found that since that last addition to Flickr in March 2017, we’ve been to Oregon 4 times, spending 44 days on the coast. We’ve gone rafting in Alaska for a couple of weeks and flew to Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro for more of the same. Strangely, we only spent a total of a few weeks in California; we used to spend that much time over there per year. We racked up nearly 60 days in Europe. Then there was the visit of our niece Katharina, who spent a few weeks with us before returning to Germany to attend university, and of course, we gave her a grand tour of the Southwest. Not counting trips around Arizona and not being extremely accurate in counting our travel dates, Caroline and I were out and about no less than 172 days over the past 1,400 days.

Add concerts, films, talks, seminars, workshops, books, and such, and I’d like to believe we spent a solid 25% of our time during the past four years exploring novelty. While I wish it had been even more, I recognize from many of my conversations and observations of others that Caroline and I lead active lives and are incredibly fortunate when it comes to being able to dedicate so much time to jumping out of routines.

This then has me asking, how do we experience time at home, watching TV, playing video games, and working compared to reading, exploring the world around us, learning, and playing? As we live on a day-to-day basis, it appears that time disappears as though it wasn’t even experienced. Stuck in routines dominated by work, television, and habituated routines with very little else happening in our lives makes time fly with little to no memory of what has passed. I can’t emphasize enough how detrimental I feel that living in a routine blind to new experiences is to the value we are able to draw from life.

But John, you’ve said all this before. That’s okay, this is one of my mantras, and as I age I never want to lose sight of how important my experiential place on Earth is. My diet, daily walks, writing exercises, and making plans that don’t always pan out are all part of the challenge of remaining in a mindset and modicum of health that I should continue as long as possible to be enchanted by the newness I’m able to explore. This is one of those reminders to myself.