- It feels like a full year. And for that I’m grateful.
I’ve come to realize don’t need things to feel perfect, or even ‘good’. I just need them to feel full.
I’ve heard people say that the perception of time speeds up as you get older because each year is a smaller fraction of the whole. 1/36 being naturally much less than 1/10. There’s an elegant logic to this. But I don’t think it’s true. It doesn’t explain why 15 months in Prague or Madrid feels like a decade, but my years of high school loneliness have merged into something indistinguishable.
There’s a different theory regarding time: that our perception is based on how many new neurological connections we form. Which feels true. It explains why the monotony of 2020 caused my brain to shuffle away whole months into the mental filing cabinet of ‘same as the last one’, until an entire year had become almost nothing except for a few moments of depth in between.
2021 on the other hand had an engagement (mine), a wedding (mine), another engagement (sister), meaningful time with my daughter, a new job which came with a genuine professional challenge and threats to my personal safety (memorable not necessarily being ‘good’). And as a result, the year feels vastly larger compared with the previous.
If ever there were a case to live for the richness of life (whatever that means to someone), it’s the perception of time.
