Where did the summer go? | 4 minute read

Hey pinkish hue

Happy Sunday. Are you ready for school, planning for Q4, hallowe’en? Heck, Home Depot is already ordering giant Santas for your front lawn.

I had an especially wild summer.

• Restructured at work

• Helped my MIL sell, buy, move out and into her new house

• And drove

I drove my kids to baseball, gynmastics, hockey, theatre, and overnight camp. In between, I drove to cottages and I think to a quick weekend getaway once. It all happened so fast I can’t entirely be sure.

And now? Now it’s the last weekend. I’m up north. School starts Tuesday. And it’s as if it never ended in the first place.

In his 2016 book, The Psychology of Time Perception, John Wearden explores how we perceive time from child to adulthood covering internal clocks models and the influence of emotion.

I want to take it a step further in our quick “thought experiment” series and incorporate a few others: The Stoics “last day” exercise (i.e. Memento Mori) the practice of contemplating your mortality to live more purposefully, and finally the random day replay popularized on, well, TikTok.

Ready to get thinking?

Hazy Days Fade Away

Stop. Be still. Don’t switch away. Stay focused. Close the door. Silence your phone. Find… quiet….

~Imagine~

Visualize time speeding up.

Outside your window, the sun drops suddenly and rises just as fast.

You turn to your bedside clock; the hours are spinning.

It’s tomorrow, next week, next year.

Those vacation flowers are cut, thrown at that wedding, and end up in a casket.

Winter turns to spring, summer then fall as if the earth inhaled then exhaled.

Decades vanish.

Then—freeze.

It’s the last day of your life. You’re old, older than you thought.

You’re lying in a hospital bed. You’re propped up, uncomfortable and alone. The machines are whirring, beeping, breathing…for you…but, you’re not ready.

Fortunately, luckily, health technology has advanced. They can hook your consciousness into a simulation, allowing you to live, relive, and experience one last day again.

It whips through your memories, your moments in time, the good days and bad… and on a random day, it stops.

It picks today.

You’re reading Saving Sundays.

Now what?

• Do you go outside to feel the warm sun on your face?

• Do you call your friends, your family, the people you lost?

• Do you eat your favourite foods again?

• Do you go for a run? Play catch? Go for a swim?

• Do something you always wanted to, but never did?

What does today mean to you now? It can be whatever you want it to be.

The pebble

It’s not a thought experiment

What’s wild is that the passage of time speeds up as we age.

Getting old, while a privilege, happens in the blink of an eye.

We can’t comprehend how short our lives are or how fast they pass. I’m in my mid-forties, but still think I’m in my mid-thirties. This is not a thought experiment. It’s aging.

Today is a gift. Be grateful for it and make it a grand one.