How I've experience time in each decade of my life

Winter Solstice is a good time to think about time

This cheese stands alone, but it also continues the conversation from my previous post, about how becoming a parent changed my understanding of Time itself.

Here’s that post, if you’re interested:

Is time a ramp, or a stair?

---

Photo by Mark Basarab on Unsplash

Winter Solstice is tomorrow, Saturday December 21st! Will you be doing anything witchy or wondrous? Much of my solstice will be spent flying up in the clouds: not exactly mulled wine by a log fire vibes, but perhaps fittingly liminal?

With age, I’ve noticed my own experience of the passage of time—of my time—has changed. The change has itself been an evolution, with three distinct phases:

I’ll call the first phase the “scarcity mindset but actual abundance” phase. This was in my twenties, when friends joined the peace corps or enrolled in grad school, and I couldn’t fathom making such long-term commitments. What young-adult, Friends / Seinfeld / S.A.T.C. / GIRLS adventures adventures would I miss out on if I checked out of Standard Young Adulthood? But a few years later, as they wrapped up those adventures, I was shocked at how little seemed to have happened in my own life during that same period. Would I really have missed so much if I’d dared to stray down some other path?

Second, at thirty, was the “epiphany phase”: I realized I could see the entire shape of a decade of my life, hold it in my hands. Ages ten through twenty, of course, did not feel like one life belonging to the same person. It was childhood, adolescence, and college—three epic lives! But from twenty to thirty there was a continuous Self, a contiguous memory, a visible narrative arc. I’d taken internships and jobs, negotiated a promotion, gone from couch-surfer to subletter to lease-holder, dated and broken up, and even finished grad school.

The third phase, the “the years are merely peanuts” phase here in this neighborhood of forty, I’ve seen two decades completed. The latter felt so much faster, so much more condensed! The personal twists themselves were fewer, but huge: marriage! kid! Though life certainly doesn’t feel slow on a day-to-day basis, in many ways it is much slower. Fewer changes of address, fewer changes of relationship. And maybe that’s why my perception of time speeds up—less friction as we slingshot around the sun.

The shocking thing about having two decades notched is the realization that there’s a finite handful of decades one can collect.

In this phase, the past and present have come closer together. Like when I heard a young woman at the doctor’s office give her year of birth as 2002 and I laughed, intensively feeling she’d misspoken, because clearly she wasn’t a baby!

Or when I am packing up summer dresses and pulling out the sweaters, and I start to wonder if it’s even worth doing, since the time between seasons is so short. As a child, the previous winter or previous summer would feel like a distant, locked-away past. The clothes from that season no longer fit, those art projects were made in a classroom I no longer belonged to.

Now it’s all touchable, the seasons as proximate as the goodies in a picnic spread all around you. Here’s my humidifier that I use every winter—it feels like I was just using it the other day … well, March wasn’t really so long ago. Here are my seed packets and pruners, just taking a short rest through these holidays. I’ll be picking up these seeds to start new plants in February, and that’ll be here in the blink of an eye!

Age makes me into a kid tall enough to see all around the dollhouse at once, or an astronaut high enough to see the outline of an entire continent.

The trip around the sun no longer feels like a trek through the narrows of a canyon, but a stroll around the canyon’s rim.

Photo by Sojy John on Unsplash

And this repeating the loop around the canyon’s rim—THIS!—is the beauty of seasons! This embodied, bone-feeling of seeing the whole year, of knowing its features and microclimates, anticipating their return and remembering what flora and fauna you’ll see and how the terrain is underfoot.

My apology to any much-younger readers if this feels ageist, or absurd, and to older ones if this is eye-rolling obvious. What can I say? We’re always the oldest we’ve ever been, and the youngest we’ll ever be.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately that so many pieces of culture that we hand down to children are hollow vessels they must keep and carry for years, until time and experience fill them with personal meaning. The cycle of the seasons, the value of ritual, the strength of unconditional love.

Can you think of anything—a religious custom, an annual family portrait, a volunteer activity, your parents going on and on about the leaves and the crisp air—like that? Something you were taught to hold as special as kid, but didn’t, but now you know why your parents or community or culture wanted you to have it?

I think what I’m trying to say is this:

Once upon a time, seasons offered novelty. (Now we’ll drink red wine instead of white! Now we’ll ice skate instead of hike!) And that’s still true, and a pleasure. But now they also offer something else, too.

Now they offer their familiarity.

We humans been doing this seasonal-ritual stuff for a looooong time. Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash