The River of Time Has Rapids
May 2023: A letter for people who can hardly believe it's already May.
Dear family, friends, and Internet strangers,
People around me keep saying, “I can’t believe it’s already May!” I want to be snarky and reply, “Yes, that’s how time works,” but the flow of the river of time seems to rush faster for me, too, each year. (In fact, this letter is getting out later than I’d planned.)
I find myself scheduling things for every two weeks, or every month, instead of weekly; weeks flee so quickly now. I’m in my early thirties. What’s it like when you’re sixty?
I hear this phenomenon only increases with age. Somewhere, I read a line that went something like, “Old people don’t appreciate how little time they have left,” referring to how slowly they seem to do things. Now it makes sense to me. If time goes quickly when you’re old, you don’t feel like you’re slow. Other people are just hurrying around.
[The soundtrack in my brain as I wrote this letter: “Time” by Hootie and the Blowfish]
I’m in my early thirties. Already, I feel like I inhale, and exhale, and two new fads have come and gone. I inhaled, and people were making fantastical self-portraits with Lensa; I exhaled, and ChatGPT was the internet’s new toy. I’m beginning another inhale. What’s new?
I told someone not too long ago that I feel old, not like a grandmother, but like Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. Like, I was there when Twitter was new, child, when MySpace was social media. I remember tamogatchis and I weep for the youth of the SnapChat and TikTok era.
However, twice in the last month friends laughed at me when I said “floppy disk” and meant the 3 1⁄2-inch save icons, not the gigantic 8-inch disks they had when they were children. If I’m Galadriel, I suppose, they are Círdan the shipwright; my “old” is meaningless to people who are closer to forty.
I do remember when I stood in the slower currents of the time-river. When I was a small child, my mom would put time into units of TV shows to give me some frame of reference. “It’s about two Rugrats episodes,” she’d say, at which point I might start trying to remember some actual Rugrats episodes to entertain my brain until the thing I was waiting for would arrive.
And, somehow, the years of the pandemic created turbulence in our collective perception of time; I heard “time soup” used somewhere and found it appropriate.
There are several theories on why time seems to flow faster as we age. One is that our mental and visual processing slows down, and the amount of actual time between “frames” of vision or other new stimuli/input gets longer. That is, our childhoods are like slow-motion videos, with higher frame rates making them feel slow in comparison. You can read more about it in this article from the European Review.
The theory seems to overlap with the “novelty” explanation, as described on this NPR page (particularly the quotes by neuroscientist David Eagleman). Our brains record new information differently than they handle the familiar. This helps explain why it feels super weird for me to be in a place for the first time, and whenever I go back to that place and it’s no longer new, I literally feel like my brain is processing it differently than it did at first.
The new experiences we have as we age are generally still placed in a framework of some kind, reminiscent of some past experience in some way; children have to learn literally every single thing new. This “novelty theory” of time perception would also help explain the time-soup phenomenon of the COVID-19 pandemic, as so many things were different.
Maybe you had to learn how to work from home, how to order groceries or dinner, how to entertain yourself when you can’t go anywhere. Maybe you learned about sourdough bread or dalgona coffee, or maybe you were helping your church set up live online services for the first time. Maybe your mealtime habits changed to fit cooking for yourself more than ever.
You had to ask questions about risk you didn’t know existed before. There was a new framework, and it kept changing as new information came to light. “Sanitize everything” became “ventilate the air”. Mask expectations changed over and over, and from one place to another. Capacity restrictions changed from state to state, week to week. Constant change means novel experiences. Time feels less predictable, and sometimes slower.
We also feel time as slow motion when something scary is happening, like a car crash, or like the time I was a freshman in high school and accidentally broke a micoscope in biology class. My foot caught in the cord and I could not stop the whole thing from crashing to the floor; everything felt slow in that moment, as if I could stop it, if only my body would move faster.
Many things were scary during COVID-19. Depending on who you are, what scared you or at least drew extra attention from you may have differed. “Will I get sick, or get someone I care about sick, if I do this?” “Will I have side effects when I get the vaccine?” “Will talking about the pandemic with this person cause a relationship-fracturing argument?”
I think the general increase in normalcy in the last six to twelve months contributes to the widespread feeling that time is going particularly quickly right now. New experiences, big surprises, and constant adjustments to our risk management approaches have dropped off for most of us. The river flows quickly and straight, again.
“But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” - 2 Peter 3:8 (ESV)
We have little control over our changing perceptions of time, but there is One who rules over the whole river and everything within it. This is a comfort.
If you’re reading this and you’re not currently a Christian, I wonder if you’re comfortable with the changes in or around you, and I wonder if you’re disturbed that your upcoming years will probably feel ever faster. I want to remind you that the comfort I have is available to you, too…though God is so much greater than a simple security blanket.
If you don’t know Christ and you would like to, or are interested and have questions, or even just want a debate, you can reply to this email. (I did experience technical difficulties last month, so if I don’t reply, try messaging my Facebook page.) If you’re not ready to reach out to someone, I suggest you start with John Piper’s message, “What Must I Believe to Be Saved?”
If you’ve recently decided to follow Jesus but don’t have any idea what the next step is, I think I can recommend Dr. James Emery White’s book, After “I Believe”. I have not yet read it myself, but I’ve been following his blog for years and I find him to be solid, compassionate, a good communicator, and rather thorough about biblical truth.
If you don’t know how to find a church, I don’t really know how to help you find one from here, but Dr. White is senior pastor at Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and they have a full online campus with services on Sundays and Tuesdays. You might begin there for now, as you also seek a good church where you reside.
“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’ ” - James 4:13-15 (ESV)
Writing Updates
This month, I finished a short story to submit to a literary journal, worked on my novel, and continued my paid editing. And, of course, I wrote this letter!
Links I Liked This Month
May is both Jewish American Heritage Month and the month of Star Wars Day (May the 4th be with you), so this turned out to be doubly relevant: “Is ‘The Mandalorian’ the most Jewish sci-fi series ever?” by PJ Grisar in Forward. By the time Din Djarin was stepping into a space mikveh in the third season of The Mandalorian, I’d already picked up some Jewish parallels in this season’s story, as Orthodox and Reformed Mandalorians work together to return to
Space JerusalemMandalore. Yet I didn’t realize just how many ties there are until I found this article.While searching for pandemic-era references to the popular feeling of “time soup”, I found a recipe for Panic Soup for Pandemic Times by Miriam Szokovski on Chabad.org. I haven’t tried making it yet, but it sounds warm and lovely.
Because the word “pyrodiversity” was a new one for me: “Woodpecker guides post-fire forest management” by Cornell University on Phys.org.
Mailbag
I did not receive replies to my April newsletter, and at least one person said she tried; we tested it a few times with no success. Substack assures me the problem has definitely been fixed, so if you replied last month and I never responded, perhaps try again today.
That’s it for May! If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:
To truth, love, and adventure,
Rae