“Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”
– William James, “The Principles of Psychology”
I spent this past weekend in San Antonio with family. What struck me about this trip was how warped my perception of time became. I was only in the city for 24 hours, yet our time there seemed to stretch over a few days. We ate delicious fajitas and tacos, walked miles downtown along the famous Riverwalk, and even made a few shopping excursions across the city. On the drive back home, I found it nearly impossible to believe we’d packed so much activity into a single day period.
Vacation time seems so different from normal time, despite each day obviously containing the same amount of hours. Over our weekend excursion, though, time seemed to stand still. As I laid down Saturday night, I considered how just a few hours earlier, I’d been at home getting ready to leave, and in less than a day, I’d be back home, remembering the entire weekend as having flown by.
Psychology writer Claudia Hammond calls this bewilderment at the passage of time the “holiday paradox”(though “vacation paradox” sounds right to an American ear) which describes how differently time seems to pass when we are in an environment different than our normal routine. In Time Warped, she writes,
“The Holiday Paradox is caused by the fact that we view time in our minds in two very different ways — prospectively and retrospectively. Usually these two perspectives match up, but it is in all the circumstances where we remark on the strangeness of time that they don’t.
[…]
We constantly use both prospective and retrospective estimation to gauge time’s passing. Usually they are in equilibrium, but notable experiences disturb that equilibrium, sometimes dramatically. This is also the reason we never get used to it, and never will. We will continue to perceive time in two ways and continue to be struck by its strangeness every time we go on holiday. “
I spent just a few hours in San Antonio, yet did so many things and had so much fun. Making the paradox even more curious is the fact I lived in San Antonio a few years back, yet this weekend excursion still had the same effect of a departure from the norm. This serves to support Hammond’s theory that our perception of time depends on our current normal routine, and isn’t impacted by a routine from the past.
Our memories depend on novel experiences. Time flies by when we are in our normal routine because there are fewer distinct experiences to hold onto. However, when we get outside our routines – whether it takes the form of physically going on vacation or just spending our day differently – time slows down due to the novelty of the experience.
One of the most fascinating and frustrating aspects of memory is how easily manipulated it is. Our memories are not a shelf where we leave snippets of time, but an active, ongoing process. New experiences are constantly being introduced to old memories, which means our “old” memories are always being re-retrieved and potentially, remixed. Our recollections are not recalling memories so much as recalling recollections of memories. It’s an open secret of psychology – our memories are really quite terrible at isolating moments in time because they are always susceptible to being influenced by events in the present. What we recall is often influenced by the situation in which we are trying to retrieve that information.
Memory also plays a vital role in how we perceive time as we get older. When we’re young, every experience is a new experience, so our minds hyper-process every day and movement. It’s why experiences we have as children seem incredibly saturated; every sight seems a Technicolor hue and every new place we visit appears magical and ready for exploration. As we age, our routines become more familiar and our brains spend less energy focusing on every aspect of our day. It’s why months and years pass by so quickly. When you do the same things each day, there is less novelty for your mind to latch onto, fewer moments of pause or extraordinary occurrences. Our perception of time, therefore, is greatly determined by how we normally spend our days.
Time possess the rare quality of being a concept we all are familiar with, yet none of us can quite explain. As St. Augustine writes, “We do in fact understand “time” when we talk of it, and we also understand when we hear somebody else talking of it. So: What is time? If nobody’s asking me, I know. If I’m trying to explain it to somebody who asks me, I don’t know.”
I love how Augustine was able to capture the strangeness of time moving from future to present to past with barely an acknowledgment of that process. I also admire his conclusion that despite “understanding” time because we live within it and can’t conceive of an existence without time, we also know shockingly little about time. It’s nearly impossible to articulate how time operates outside of our own subjective perspectives and experiences. Can time exist without an observer?
The present is always fleeting, yet we have no choice but to harness it as best we can, making the most of both our routines at home and our time exploring different cities over the weekend.
Photo by Weston MacKinnon on Unsplash
