Why does Time go by Faster as we Age?
I know I’m not the only one who blinked when 2025 began and now it is August. Every year, every trip around the sun I experience seems to go by faster and faster. I look back on more than half of this year gone already, and I ask myself how this could be? I look at my baby who just turned 14 months old today, and wonder how he is walking, babbling up a storm, and is no longer the sweet little sack of potatoes he was when we brought him home a year ago? I feel like I just graduated high school, yet almost 14 years have gone by already. Where did the time go?
When you’re a child, the minutes feel like hours, the hours like days. Time felt so slow back then, and so many children, including myself, were so antsy to grow up. We couldn’t wait to be an adult, but adulthood felt so far out of reach.
But then it didn’t. And now here we are, full-grown adults with bills and all. Reparenting our inner child in adult bodies while maintaining and navigating the responsibilities that comes with being grown. Doing it all in what feels like such a short amount of time, but really, time hasn’t changed. Instead, we have changed.
To a child, everything is a new experience. Children navigate the world with a fresh lens. They are free from programming, from indoctrination, from the implemented fear that we develop as we grow older. Children are rooted, grounded in the body and connected to the heart space. They are the greatest teachers when it comes to spirituality 101, which is to be utterly present in the moment. Amidst the presence, time slows down. They fully submerge themselves into every experience because every experience is new, waiting to be discovered and explored for the first time.
We lose this connection to the present as we grow older. Humans have become so conditioned to disconnect from their bodies, from their heart space, that they find safety and security in the mind. Where there was once communion between mind and heart, the bridge between starts to thin. From trauma, unhelpful belief systems, disempowering environmental factors, adults are quick to learn that there is a sense of security and control in a world where we have little to no control, when we remain in the mind.
When was the last time you did the dishes and slowed down? Instead of thinking about all the things you didn’t get done that day or the things that need to be done tomorrow, when was the last time we actually tuned into our breath, consciously felt the warm water running over our hands, listened to the running water, and felt the textures of the silverware between our fingers? All of a sudden, the sink is clean before we even realize, because we spent the majority of the time in the thinking mind rather than the observing mind?
As adults, we have unconsciously consented to let time take us rather than us take back time. Before we know it, half the year has gone by and we ask ourselves, “Where did the time go?”
The truth is time hasn’t changed, but rather our attunement to it has.
Perhaps the work we need to prioritize is not the chores on our to-do list, but rather how we choose to spend our time while crossing off our to-do lists. To return back to the present moment, bringing our involuntary breath into a voluntary state, and tuning into the senses, grounding back into the body, while we partake in our everyday lives.
Through this work, spirituality 101, is when we remember that while time goes on, we don’t have to blink and it’s gone. We can choose to be here, be now, be in it, through each and every moment, one dish at a time.
