“Time moves at different rates for each of us. It is that simple”

                                                                                                                             Albert Einstien

Inspired by Mann.

We feel that we travel from birth to death through time always heading in a forward direction. We look back at where we have been now and then as we remember our past randomly. Events which had deep emotional value or events that caused us pain are more likely to be recalled.  We live and we also reflect upon living. Often we become so caught up in our day to day life that we fail to see our life as a whole. To see our life’s patterns or the overall characterists of events and feelings helps to bridge our elusive past with our uncertain future. We are always changing, because our perception of life is always changing. We change whether we want to or not. The past is instructive but it is not  healthy to hold on to the past. It is only when we freeze the past in an attempt to preserve it beyond its time that we may become forzen in time ourselves, unable to grow or evolve anymore, though we breath and eat, we won’t feel as of we are truly living. Change is life.

If you live long enough you will notice an intersting thing, as you get older you start to feel as if time is speeding up. Our sense of time changes also when we drink alcohol or stimulants, or if we experience sad or exciting emotional events. Time is elastic, biological time is elastic, time passes faster as we age. Can you remember the long days of summer as a child that stretched out to infinity, all your joys and sorrows rooted deep in your memory. Are you now aware of how much more accelerated time feels as you age ? We have inner biological and psychological clocks that have their own perception of the passage of time and they convey those perceptions to us. We constantly compare our inner passage of time with outer clocks. How we perceive time profoundly effects how we live our lives.

As we age, our metabollism slows down, with modulations created by the type of food we eat, thoughts we think, and feelings we feel. When we eat, digestion slows our whole body down, when we exercise our metabolism speeds up. Cigarettes temporarily accelerate our metabolism. A faster metabolism is concomitant to early life, so stimulants make us feel temporarily that we are younger than we are. This is why it is so easy to become addicted to tobacco, caffeine, and other stimulants.

Our bodies are subject to rapid changes within the womb. After birth, we are subject to longer growth cycles through to adolescence and then the gradual crystalizing of life into the longer decades of adulthood. According to our biological clock our time sense is inversely proportional to our metabolism. When in early life our metabolism is fast, time passes slowly; as we age and our metabolism slows down, our time sense accelerates and compacts more and more until in middle age it is flying by and in old age is passing by faster than we can keep track of it. This is why for the elderly life appears as a blur of activity before them which they can barely grasp. 

Amoung the many psychological implications of the acceleration of time is that the early stages of our life occupy proportionally greater importance in the whole. Because our metabolism is so fast and our time sense elongates in childhood, early events carry more energy, appear to last longer, and have a relatively greater importance in our psychological and emotional lives than do later events. Ironically, very few of us remember anything before the age of four or five, yet those earliest events carry the most powerful psychological changes. Perhaps time is precieved in these very early years in such long space intervals that the moments no longer seem to make a forward motion impact and thus leave less of an impression on our memory. I am only speculating because this time of our life is recorded on our psyche whether we remember it or not.

The natural key to youth and a higher metabolism is Meditation and Yoga which are of such great value to us as we age. Meditation and Yoga speed up our metabolism by providing us with more energy through deep breathing, relaxation and stress reduction. Yoga is a youth enhancing elixser that not only makes us feel young but allows us to precieve the passage of time more slowly, giving the events of our life deeper meaning and significance. Yoga changes how we precieve time allowing us to focus on each moment as a longer and more rich event. We can stand time on its head with Meditation and Yoga. Stay young do yoga.