Some perspective on how why 2020 feels both like it’s been momentous and that it’s whizzed past:
It’s not entirely an illusion. Without the usual work mixers, festive holiday celebrations, far-flung vacations or casual dinners that typically mark and divide the calendar, the brain has a harder time processing and cataloging memories, psychologists say, and the stress of the year itself can shift how our brains experience time… Sheer monotony has the ability to warp time and tangle our memories, psychologists say, with quarantines and lockdowns robbing us of the “boundary events” that normally divide the days, like chapters in a book.
I think it’s more important than ever to practice deliberation in our lives. To live deliberately, according to the writer and thinker Thoreau,
… to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms
Neat.
In more prosaic terms, in my interpretation,
Living deliberately is making an active choice in how to spend one’s time – and, over weeks, months and years – one’s life.
Each of us has some leeway in the everydays of our life, even if not in immediately in the broad strokes. We can make choices to pursue what is dear to us, or to invest in ourselves, or to become part of something larger than us, or any combination of these.
We can choose to restart an interest of ours. Re-engage with communities and groups we’ve fallen out of touch with. Start a new hobby we’ve always liked but didn’t know if it’d stick. Pursue our physical and mental well-being. Join a local cause. Whatever it looks like for each of us. And do it for no reason than because we can.
We do this by examining how we spend our average day, which in 2020 looks like all other days. And being honest with ourselves about which things we do by default. Which things we do inefficiently. Which things we would be better off trading for something fresh.
We also do this by actively using the technology in our lives in addition to its passive consumption. We can be deliberate even with consumption-only tools: finding shows and/or documentaries on Netflix about an interest of ours, instead of merely accepting its recommendation about what to watch next. Or creating a new Reddit account with fewer but more carefully chosen subreddits and using that for a few weeks.
Being deliberate means we spend most hours actively making a decision about how to spend them, instead of letting habits and circumstance dictate this. Consequently,
Fewer hours just slip by. Days begin to look different. Milestones emerge. Memories form. A narrative forms about how we spent October or November. Time crystallises, no longer disappearing through a sieve.
This is not to diminish the very real constraints each of us face, whether they are problems with money, health, relationships, opportunities, quality of life. The principle is simply to recognise and act on whatever agency we have in our lives, however large or small it may be.
2020 is the epitome of the adage the days are long but the years are short. By spending each day deliberately, we can lengthen some of those years.
(Featured image photo credit: Ryan James Christopher/Unsplash)