“Wow, I can’t believe it’s already March!”

One of my friends sighed. All of us nodded in agreement, “Yeah…time flies…”

We were in Adelaide for the weekend to check out a festival. As the conversation moved on to something else, I was still on stuck on the terrifying thought of time slipping by faster with each passing year. I glanced to the guy beside me and said, “I wonder why that is.”

He looked at me confused. “Hm? What do you mean?”

“Oh, I just wonder why time feels like it’s going by faster as we get older? There must be some reason for it.”

He just shrugged and said, “Dunno.”

But this actually haunts me. I don’t want to blink and suddenly be 90 years old, sitting in an old folks home, and saying to the nurses, “Well time sure flies, doesn’t it?” Instead, I want to be able to say, “Wow, I’m still alive! I can still remember each decade of my life with vibrancy and detail!”

Surely, there’s a way to make time at least feel a little slower.

Once we returned from Adelaide, I jumped on to Google and searched for answers.

It turns out that time feels slower when we’re exposed to things that we’ve never seen before. Our brain is on overdrive, trying to process and understand all this new information. When everything’s new, our senses are heightened trying to capture it all. As a result, our brain tends to record more richly detailed information, and time appears to slow down.

This is why my weekend away in Adelaide felt like an entire week. My mind was going nuts processing all sorts of new, interesting stimuli. On the plane ride home, I leaned back in my chair feeling cheeky that I’d squeezed more than my fair share out of the weekend.

The problem is, of course, we can’t always be running around doing new things all the time. It would be exhausting and financially unsustainable (at least for the majority of us). Eventually, we need to settle down into some sort of routine.

But the moment we become familiar with our surroundings, our minds don’t need to work as hard analysing and understanding our environment. As one familiar day morphs into another familiar day, our lives quickly slip into autopilot mode. Without novelty, life then gains momentum and picks up speed.

So how do you get yourself out of autopilot mode and back into novel seeking mode without going on vacation?

By being mindfully aware of everything happening, moment to moment. The very act of being present forces our mind open to capture all sorts of delicious minute-to-minute goodness.

So, this past month, that’s exactly what I’ve done. I became obsessed with street photography, and am always on the lookout for a beautiful moment to capture. By doing so, I’ve made an active effort to pay attention to my life with new eyes.

The collage above contains some of the photos I’ve taken of the random details of everyday life. After all, our life is made of details. Everything we experience and build memories from is a collection of details; they’re the tiny pebbles in sand that form the whole—from the way the sun casts its morning rays in my kitchen, to the way the keys fit into the door at the end of a long day.

It’s all the little moments that make our entire lives. Here’s to stopping and soaking in the moment before to slips by.

~

Author: Kimberly Hetherington
Image: Author’s Own; Mallory Johndrow/Unsplash
Editor: Catherine Monkman