#reverb16 // Day 21 // Time

Sarah, Meredith, Kat and I are hosting the #reverb16 December challenge with daily writing prompts for the whole month! You can join in anytime by finding our Facebook group. Use the #reverb16 hashtag when posting on social media so we can find you!

Time. It’s something we never have enough of and can never get back once it’s spent. How do you prioritize your time? What would you like to make more time for?

I marvel at the complexity of time. How long and short it feels all at the same time. How we process time and memories in our brains. It reminds me of a post from last year's reverb15 where we wrote for 5 minutes on the word "blink". Excerpt here:

"I read something very interesting about time several years ago, specifically about the phenomenon about our perception about time. When we have the same experiences over and over again - like the routines and monotonous days that we wrote about on Day 13- our brains don't slow down to processes any new information. Like a hard drive, if the information already exists, you just need a link, an arrow, to point back to what you already know. And because there's nothing new there, the time lapse in your brain is very compact and it feels very fast. It's monday. Then it's suddenly monday again. And again. And again. And then it's 2016, gosh!

But when you have a brand new experience, learn something new, see something new... those memories have to be stored fresh. And they take up lots of space. Lots of space in your brain feels like a longer period of time. So, while my time in New Zealand was not nearly long enough, I can look back and say that while I was there, and even looking back, 3 weeks there was a substantial amount of time. It is taking up a lot of space in my head - which I absolutely love. It felt like it was a long time to be away from home. Every single day was stimulating and a learning experience in so many different ways."

It was funny, this information has stuck with me so intensely that I go out of my way to do things out of routine. For example, when we were in France earlier this month, we had the task of walking from our apartment to the veterinary clinic where Levi was recovering every day, sometimes multiple times a day. It was about a 30 minute walk. The first time we walked there and back it seemed like it took so long to get there. And then within just a day or two the walk became routine and it felt so short. So we went out of our way to walk on the other side of the street, to take different combinations of roads to walk along to get to the same place. We stopped in different cafes and grocery stores along the way.

The picture above, it was the road the clinic is on. We saw it every day. We tried to see it in a different way, every day. And while the 2 weeks we lived in Versailles flew by, I feel like we stretched out time in our heads and our hearts as much as we possibly could.

#reverb16 #Reflect