A matter of time

Happy New Year!

‘Where has 2017 gone?’ ‘I lost all track of time.’

​I find it curious how a subjective sense of time vs an objective measure of time can be and feel so incredibly different. Some hours, days and weeks seem to pass incredibly quickly. Others go on as if they will last forever. Our sense of perspective on time changes over time. For example, when I was a young child, World War 2 seemed like it happened hundreds of years ago. As I get older, paradoxically it seems closer.

It’s as if how we perceive the time-distance is relative to how long we have been alive. The longer I live, the shorter the time-gap seems and feels to me. I’m intrigued by how some distant events in my own life feel as they happened just yesterday whereas some more recent events feel like they happened eons ago. I think it’s somehow related to how we experience those events emotionally, e.g. ‘Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself.’

Our perspective on time seems also connected to how far experiences from the past still affect us now or, perhaps, how far they resonate with what we are experiencing now, as if they set up a psychodynamic reverberation effect. Some say, ‘Time is a great healer’, as if the passage of times creates distance between us and the emotional impact of an event so that it no longer carries the same depth or intensity of feeling. It’s sometimes true.

There is chronos time (sequential moments) and kairos time (pivotal moments). The New Year marks a point in time, a shift in seasons, a transition from- and thereby -to. For some, it marks a psycho-symbolic ending, a closing of a metaphorical door on whatever has gone before. For others, it holds a fresh hope to re-set our lives – a lot like the promise held out in the gospel. As the clock chimes midnight into 2018, what will the new year mean for you?