@HomeWithDean - 1/30 Homily - a podcast by KFI AM 640 (KFI-AM)

Can I share something with you that I just recently learned? I just had a birthday a couple of weeks ago and also today’s show begins the sixth year of HOME here on KFI. I can’t believe it. I meet folks now that say, “I’ve been listening to you for years and years,” and it sounds weird to me because it still feels like we just started. So, naturally I’ve been curious of late how it seems that time flies by faster and faster as we grow older. And of course, I’ve done a little research. It turns out there are some very definitive reasons for that experience. One is the way our brains record new experiences.

Think of a new experience as the tick of a clock. When we were children everything was new at virtually every moment. Tick, tick, tick, tick. But as we grow older the truly new experiences come farther apart with more time passing between each one. Tick … tick … tick … tick.

Now at first glance that seems like time should move faster for kids and more slowly for adults, and in one sense it does. Because of our more developed neural circuitry and the guiding hand of experience, adults have the potential to make more of a moment and waste less time whereas kids waste a lot of time. It’s hard for kids to sit still and focus on the moment. Youth is truly wasted on the young. So yes, in one sense, as adults we can extract more out of each moment than when we were just burning up time as children.

So why then does a child’s sense of time drag on and on while ours races by? Apparently it’s not about actual time but about how our memory perceives time. And how does memory perceive time? It doesn’t.

When our brains remember we don’t remember actual time. We remember experiences. Specifically, we best remember new experiences. Think of looking back through memory like looking at a mountain range from a distance. You see layers and layers of peaks spread across the horizon. Some are in front, others farther back, but they all seem packed pretty close together. Of course, they are not all close together. What you don’t see are all the valleys. The space between the peaks. Some of those valleys are very small, others stretch for miles and miles, but we don’t see any of them. Just the peaks. That’s memory.

When we’re young and almost everything is a new experience we build a lot of memory peaks all very close together. Tick, tick, tick. The first hundred memory peaks pop up in just the first ten years. But these days it takes longer to make a mountaintop experience … tick … tick … tick. In your first ten years you made a hundred. In the last ten years, I don’t know … maybe five? And since our memory only sees the peaks and not the time in between we look back at the last few mountains made and then glance at the calendar and rightly say, “My God, where has the time gone?”

I’ll tell you exactly where the time has gone. It is stretched out, forever lost to memory, in the long flat unseen valleys that lie in between truly new things.

So here’s the bad news … there’s no going back to making a hundred memories a minute. That’s a child’s mind and by definition a mature mind cannot be child’s mind. But … a mature mind can be a child-like mind. It can keep learning, stretching and growing. If there’s one upside to the world being so very big and we being so very small it’s that there’s so much more for us to see and learn and do than we could ever see and learn and do in a thousand lifetimes. So don’t stop.

The moral of the story is simple … If you don’t want the years to just slip away, keep moving, keep growing, keep changing, keep exploring, keep learning, keep the valleys narrow, and keep

climbing mountains and making memories. Don’t stop making memories, and when you do come to the end you’ll look back at all the mountains you climbed and see that you’ve built yourself a beautiful life.

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