Have you ever felt that life is just going by too quickly?

I have found as I get older that the years seem to pass by ever faster: it only seems like yesterday that I was at school, I had my first crush on someone, I was going to my first job interview, I was renting my first apartment!

Estimating the length of an activity or event

When it comes to how we perceive time, humans can estimate the length of an event from two very different perspectives:

• Prospective vantage – while an event is still happening
• Retrospectively – when it has ended

Prospective Vantage

Let’s consider our mindset related to an event whilst it is happening. (I’m not going to bring in the emotional response a particular activity or event may evoke for now, but more about our attitude.)

Have you ever felt ‘in the zone’: fully immersed, engaged and energised by what you were doing, so much so that you lost all sense of space and time?

In 1975, a Hungarian Psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, named this state of mind as FLOW, although this sense of being can be found mentioned in early Eastern texts centuries before.

Does this sound familiar, and why does this happen?

For ‘Flow’ to happen, our skill set must match our challenge. If the challenge is too hard for us this leads to anxiety. If it is too easy, we experience boredom. As just three mindsets seems a little simplistic, the model was further developed in to eight states and is represented as follows:

If we remember an activity that has achieved ‘Flow’, looking back it will seem to have lasted longer than more mundane experiences, even though at the time, time seemed to pass very quickly.

Retrospective Time

Now let’s reflect on the passage of time and recalling activities or events. In 2005, a study by German psychologists of some 500 participants aged 14 to 94 years old looked at retrospective time and found that:

• For all ages, time periods of a day, week, up to a year, seemed to pass quickly at the same rate…
• But for longer time periods such as a decade, people above the age of 40 perceived that time was accelerating, that later decades in their lives were passing quicker than in their childhood or young adult periods.

Does this sound familiar and why does this happen?

Well, our brain encodes new experiences, but not familiar ones, into memory, and our retrospective judgment of time is based on how many new memories we create over a certain period.

Therefore, the greater the number of new memories we build over a few days, the longer those days will seem in hindsight.

This paradox, which has been called the holiday paradox, seems to make sense as to why, in retrospect, time seems to pass more quickly the older we get.

From childhood to young adulthood, we experience many unique situations and learn countless new skills. As adults, though, our lives become more routine, and our experiences are much more mundane. Hence, on reflection, our early years tend to be relatively overrepresented in our autobiographical memory and seem to have lasted longer.

“The butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough – Rabindranath Tagore

5 Tips to slowing down time

The good news is that this means we can slow time down in later life. We can alter our perception of time by:

1. Keeping our brain active

   In the past we had to rely on newspaper crosswords, collections of Sudoku and puzzles offered in cheap magazines, and card or board games to keep our brains ticking. These days we have a wealth of mobile apps to keep us intrigued and the explosion of online gaming means there is no room for boredom!

2. Continually learning skills and ideas

   Before the 1990’s we would learn new ideas & skills through books, TV, Radio and evening classes, but now there is a wealth of information and courses available at our fingertips with mobile devices & computers. There is no excuse for not learning something new.

3. Engaging in ‘Flow’ activities

   In both work and play we should seek challenges that match or just stretch our skill set to aim for that wonderful state of ‘Flow’ more often than we are currently doing.

4. Exploring new places

   This doesn’t necessarily mean going to new countries or cities. We can look for ways to vary the route to work, find new walking trails, try a new watering hole to eat or drink at!

5. Creating different experiences

   Most important of all, we shouldn’t focus on the mundane or be ‘too busy’ at the expense of creating new memories with family & friends.

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Life IS going too fast, but now you know how you can slow down time!

Have you ever thought about who will take care of things?

This is not a question that I ponder daily but crops up now and then, particularly when I attend a funeral. But if you are like me, my busy life takes over and I toss the question aside.

When we do consider what could happen and when, whom we may have responsibility for, what our needs will be when we approach the intersection of life with death, then who will be our guardian can be tricky question to answer.

It may be several people that have a different role depending on their relationship with us, their skill set, how close they live, and their willingness to help. There may be people we specifically don’t want to be our guardian: so as not to burden them with the responsibility; because we may have fallen out with them; it could cause conflict with family & friends; or simply because we don’t trust them to do what we want.

Financial & Practical Matters and our Health & Well-being

Financial & Practical Matters

A guardian that oversees our financial affairs after death will be an Executor of our Will. It is general for this Executor to be granted an Enduring Power of Attorney (EPoA). An EPoA provides a person the authority to act for you, and not necessarily under instruction from you, and it is important to have an EPoA in place should you suffer a mental decline. Often a family solicitor, a surviving spouse, adult children or close relatives are named as Executors of a Will and are granted an EPoA. It is general for there to be more than one, and necessary for them to be able to work together without conflict.

A Power of Attorney provides a person the authority to act for you but only under instruction from you. It may be necessary to receive help on a day to day basis, with banking transactions, selling the family home and transitioning into aged care where you are mentally capable but physically struggling. This could be granted to one of your adult children, a trusted neighbour, or a friend that you want to attend to matters only under your guidance.

Health & Well-being

A guardian who makes decisions about our medical needs is often referred to as our Health Care Proxy. We often have strong views about how we want to live out the last of our days and sometimes the person that will take best care of our health and wellbeing is not necessarily the same as the person who may attend to our financial affairs.

We may have made the odd comment throughout our lives when coming across situations and said things like: “I don’t want to live in a state like that” or “If that happens to me, put me out of my misery”, but very few of us have been through the complex medical scenarios that can arise and have formally discussed and recorded our wishes.

We can set out our medical and well-being wishes in an Advance Care Directive or ‘Living Will’, as it is commonly referred to, and nominate one or more Health Care Proxies. This may be a specific person or a sub-set of your family & friends, and you may actually spell out who you don’t want to make health care decisions for you.

When should I do this?

Surprisingly, research by various bodies in Australia, UK & the US find 1 out of 2 people do not have a valid Will! If you don’t have a Will, or there has been a birth, death, marriage or divorce since you wrote yours, then it will require updating and you will need to make an appointment with a solicitor.

Whilst the number of people writing Living Wills has increased in recent years, particularly in the US, in Australia the number of people without this formal document in place is around 86%.

Just remember, we never know what tomorrow may bring…

When needs are not discussed, and Guardians are unknown

My dad was a carpenter who went into the shop fitting industry and worked in the 50’s & 60’s with asbestos. In the early 90’s he was diagnosed with mesothelioma and suffered a painful death.

At the time, my mum was in denial about his medical condition, thinking he would get better, and so found it difficult to discuss his medical wishes with him. Towards the end of his life, his doctors turned to me as the eldest adult child for guidance on resuscitation. Even though we knew his prognosis, because we couldn’t or hadn’t discussed what he wanted, it led to a feeling of onerous responsibility on me.

When my mother died many years later, we were not able to find her Will and therefore didn’t know who her Executors were for some time, which caused a lot of family conflict around short-term decisions that had to be made.

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.”

– Isaac Asimov

Nominating our Guardians

Your formal guardians are considered to be trusted family friends or professionals that will take care of you should you lose physical or mental capacity towards the end of your life, and who will manage any of your responsibilities such as children under the age of 18, as well as disposing of your property when you die. These can be:

1. The Executors of your Will,
2. Persons granted a Power of Attorney, or
3. Your Health Care Proxies.

You may also have informal guardians such as a neighbour, a volunteer, or an aged care provider that takes care of your physical and well-being needs.

Selecting our guardians and providing them the formal documentation, relevant information, and knowledge of their responsibilities, is the key to ensuring we reduce the risk of anxiety, issues and potential conflict in families.

With our guardians in place and our personal affairs in order we can approach any adversity such as an accident or illness or the end of our lives with comfort and ease.

“There is no real ending, just the place where you stop the story.@

– Frank Herbert

Choose your guardians wisely and know that everything will be ok.

Have you considered what digital life story you are leaving behind?

If you reflect for a moment. If you lost someone today would you have a complete story of their lives? … and conversely, would they have yours?

Prior to the birth of the internet in 2003, it was difficult finding any information about anyone. The problem today there is too much information and it often makes it hard for us to find what we want and know we have kept somewhere. So how do we expect our families and future generations to construct our life story from our digital mess?

Think of the digital footprint we are leaving; emails & their attachments, websites & blogs, social media posts containing images, video & words including our gems of wisdom on Twitter!

Then there’s data stored in our filing systems on our latest & old computers & phones; hard drives, disks, SD cards and let’s not forget our clouds! One Drive, My Drive, Dropbox – how can I have filled them all?

There is so much personal data we are generating and most of it’s all jumbled up.

The inspiration to declutter our digital space

Just as Marie Kondo’s inspiration to declutter our homes, we should consider declutter our devices, cleaning up the digital footprint we are leaving, and perhaps to even go one stage further; to think about what we are creating information and why.

Curating our digital life story is one of the most rewarding things we can do. We should all consider the future of our legacy, both from the perspective of both the physically and digital footprints we are leaving behind.

“To put things in order means to put your past in order, too”

― Marie Kondo

The explosion of digital data we generate

The internet slid gracefully into our lives around 2003, and the amount of data we produce is exploding exponentially. Did you know the world creates over 2.5 trillion Gigabytes of data daily?

Our digital universe is enormous: What we generate every minute of every day is truly staggering!

Aren’t we all leave a huge digital footprints of our lives? Yet how many times do we hear of swathes of information lost by a social media platform often due to security breaches?

“Every 2 days we create as much data as we did from the dawn of time to the year 2003”

― Kerry Wright

Will our digital data be lost or deleted?

My Aunty Frieda, was like many elderly people, staying connected to the family was important. She overcome her fear of technology and became quite proficient on an iPad. She regularly popped up in my newsfeed with photos she’d taken and comments on family posts, leaving a small digital footprint of the last few years of her life.

Aunty Frieda died a couple of years back, she was 81. At Christmas, her Birthday and the anniversary of her death my family left tributes and we exchanged messages of shared times together with her.

The other day I received an email from my Cousin saying my Aunts Facebook account had been hacked and he was going to have to delete it. A family friend wrote “Have loved keeping Frieda on my list x It is with great sadness I am going to unfriend her xxx only on Facebook – always in my heart.”

I too was sad when my Aunty disappeared from my friends list, a real reminder that despite how much digital information we produce, not only information can be difficult to find, it can also be deleted beyond our control; Social media accounts are just not permanent!

Curating our digital data to secure our unique personal stories

Like most of us, if we don’t do something soon, life stories and wisdom based on our unique personal experiences, may be lost for good to our families and future generations, especially as the more we rely on social media sites and apps to document our lives.

We should all set a time for a digital declutter of our devices, saving the more important memories in text & images and curating our life story so that our unique personal stories can be found in a digital sea of data and shared forever.

“The human spirit must prevail over technology”

– Albert Einstein

Think about your footprint and what digital decluttering you can start to do!