#reverb15 // Day 20 // Long days, short years

Kimberly Schoenauer
Dec 20, 2015
2 min read

I'm joining pals Sarah and Elizabeth to write every day in the month of December, feel free to join in any time! Today's prompt: The Days are Long but the Years are Short. Agree? Disagree? What felt long and what felt short this year?

Well, I didn't read ahead on the daily posts to know this was coming up in #reverb15, but I kind of wrote about the phenomenon of our perception of time in my post Blink.

If you perhaps were not enticed to read it by the name of the prompt, which was free writing, and my uninspired hook, which was random ramblings, then there is much more in store for you in that post than you might have imagined. Stop here, go back, and read.

If you're all read up, I'll tack onto my previous musings by addressing the specific notion of long days and short years. We are so lucky if we have long days and long years - it is what we would attempt to achieve by trying something new every day and making choices that allow us to learn and grow. But, even when we do, and the days are long, we look back and from where we stand, the year happened in a single moment.

How else could our brain process something as big as 365 individual days, some of which we remember, and many of which we don't, without reducing it to a flash? That story about the Costco wine cabinet, which I was able to recall every detail of, seems like it happened more than just 11 months ago. Along with the other million things that happened early in the year.

It's equally overwhelming, to be fair, to think of the future in more than just a single moment as well. That's why, when confronted by a really long arduous process or the first steps in carrying out our dreams, we feel so overcome by it. We feel like that future moment when it will all be done and worth it is tomorrow, the only future date that is tangible to us, which is just impossible. Of course it's not going to be done by tomorrow.

So, I agree and disagree with the notion of long days and short years... but does it really matter? I'm striving for long days, long years, and plenty of time to achieve the things I dream about, one step at a time.