It’s a truism that as we get older, time picks up speed. The year that stretches out forever in fifth grade has a much different feel when we are in our twenties. By the time we’ve lived six or seven decades, that single year goes by disturbingly fast. But this accelerating speed through life isn’t the only surprise that the shifting sense of time’s flow offers us.
Every instant we spend in this world we are living on time’s leading edge, throwing up behind us a virtual mountain of events that make up the past. Most of this detritus is quickly forgotten; a small amount ends up stored in archives and databases, recorded on video, and increasingly today stuffed away somewhere on the internet.
Most of us, when we do cast an eye backwards at the ever-mounting pile of data left behind by humanity, are often overwhelmed. “How do I make sense of all this?,” we may ask. “What does any of it have to do with my life?” And so we move on, barely looking over our shoulder as we rush on through the days and the years.
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Historians, on the other hand, burrow into this mountain of names and dates, places, and events, seeking patterns that reveal who we are and how we got to this point in history. Perhaps they can offer lessons for how to live going forward. They chop up time into historical eras, not arbitrarily of course, but with an eye for extracting the most meaning. Often they frame their studies by theme and subject matter. Other times by country or region.
But as we get older, whether our interest in the past is serious, casual, or even non-existent, life offers us our own way to structure the past. There is only one question. How long have you lived? And from the answer to that question flows another. How does the length of your life – your lifespan – alter your sense of history?
Stretches of time, say a century, that seem impossibly long to a teen or a young adult, have shrunk when we are much older. Look back even further and events that once seemed ancient are not nearly so distant.
This insight first struck me, forcefully, when I turned thirty-three. I sensed something special about my new age when I realized that it would take only three of my lifetimes to span a century. I imagined a row of doll-like figures, paper cut-outs, all of them holding hands, strung out one after the other like you might see in a magazine of children’s games and puzzles.
What if I was one of those three figures, standing in the middle, my hands locked tightly in the grasp of my two companions? Three people in a row holding hands isn’t that many; neither are three lifetimes strung together, stretching back into the past.
I had lived thirty-three years. Suddenly, a century didn’t seem like that much time.
My sense of the past, of the passage of time itself, and of the long arc of history, had changed in just a few seconds. The impact was so startling that to this day, I remember exactly where I was when the insight struck.
Today, several decades later, the effect is even stronger. Now, three lifetimes take me back to the early decades of the 19th century, when slavery still ruled the South, and the nation was drawing closer to the storm of the Civil War.
A growing child stands against a wall in the family home, a wall marked off in feet and inches, to measure how fast he is growing, his body surging upward into new life. I, on the other hand, looking back on a lifetime of growth and experience, measure myself against the long yardstick of history. It is in this inner world of time, memory, and reflection on the past, not the outer world of feet and inches, that I find my measure of growth.
This telescoping of time is purely personal and is of little use to the historian. It won’t give us a meaningful way to divvy up the past so that we can better understand the Great Depression or untangle the causes of the Crimean War.
What it can do instead is teach us that the recorded history of humanity that formerly seemed infinitely long, so vast that the very idea of measurement seemed impossible, is really quite brief. The true vastness of time lies in the millions of years before humans existed on earth and, if you are of a religious turn of mind, in the eternity in which God dwells.
