Where Has Our Time Gone? We Blinked!
The mystery of time's passing
It is funny how things trigger feelings. I was watching an episode of a John Hamm show the other day. He and his co-star, they play a divorced couple, were sitting on a front step discussing the turmoil caused by their teen-aged daughter. The mom just sighed and said that it was just the other day that we brought her home from the hospital: “what happened?” “We blinked”, responded the John Hamm character.
Funny, but so many of us have played out that conversation in a variety of ways. We may look in the mirror and ask how that person staring back got there and who is this person anyway? It may be a flash moment with a grandchild, seeing them dressed up for the Prom or behind the wheel of their car and the thought flashes across our consciousness: “where did the time go?”. We blinked! Chaim Potok, in his book “The Chosen” has a take on this. In a wonderful section his two main characters discuss life. The rabbi reminds the young man who is the main character. that we are here, in the grand scheme of the universe, for what amounts to a blink of an eye. We blinked! Where did the time go and where is our place in it?
Time is a precious commodity in Judaism. Our rituals are timed to it, our calendar, our life cycle, and it is the one thing that, try as we might, we cannot control. This reality becomes more meaningful as we grow older and so the question emerges as to what do we do with the time we have left knowing that we cannot control the time we have left? Let me suggest that this is THE spiritual question of our moment. It is not unexpected that recently we have seen some articles that have raised the idea that how we see the time we have left determines how we see our own aging. A recent article in the Yale School of Public Health by Dr. Becca Levy has become a beacon in this revision of how we see our aging.
Dr. Levy drew on information gathered from a national longitudinal study, the Health and Retirement Study of more than 11,000 people. How people thought about their own aging was a major determining factor in their ability to thrive as they aged. Levy reported that they found “that improvement in later life is not rare, it’s common, and it should be included in our understanding of the aging process”. That study also indicated a very interesting insight that we often hold views of aging based on the messages we received as we grew up. Scholars thought that “baseline age beliefs” were very meaningful, considering that whether people “had assimilated more positive or more negative views about aging by the start of the study”. It would appear that how we viewed and assimilated views of aging as we grew up fashioned how we viewed our own aging.
Now, think about many of the differences between how our generation were raised viewing aging and how we are living it. Boomers have reshaped growing older. We are much more involved with living, our grandchildren and creating experiences. This parallels our emphasis on wellness and, of course, is hugely dependent on having the economic security to do all of this. The first Boomer wave is now turning 80. Where did the time go? Yes, we blinked, but we still have much more to see, experience and live.
Shalom,
Rabbi Richard F. Address