By Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

A line from a short series I have been watching on Amazon stuck with me a few nights ago—the way something sticky clings to the bottom of your shoe making you rethink your steps. The series is Tales from the Loop, based on an artbook by Simon Stålenhag. Two of the characters in the series utter this phrase at different times. In both cases, it is imbued with much deeper meaning than their listeners could possibly understand.

I hope my readers will pardon the navel-gazing, but these words have prompted me to think about the flow of time in my own experience. And it has heightened my awareness of an economic reality of life—that time seems most valuable when it is in shortest supply. There’s nothing surprising about this. Indeed, the same could be said about any commodity that one can name.

I began writing this entry almost a week ago, but marking yet another birthday since then has occasioned deeper reflection. When I was a child, a year was like a lifetime. (In fact, at a certain point in a child’s experience, a year is literally a lifetime.) That lack of perspective about the passage of time, combined with the fact that we don’t carry memories of our own births, lends a sense of timelessness to the experience of our lives, as if we had always been here. Given this illusion, it is only natural for us to assign a relatively minor value to time when we’re young.

Some of us may be awakened early from this chrono-somnambulance by some critical life event—like an illness, an accident, or the passing of someone dear—but most will not. Others may seem to be in a hurry¸ but usually to accumulate things, experiences, or accomplishments.

For many, the price of time goes up with parenthood. Old enough to have gained some of the perspective of the passing years that they earlier lacked, they see how quickly the years fly by in the lives of their children. The phrase, “The only constant is change,” becomes more than just something one says. It is the desperate reality of life.

Retirement is a time to finally get off the proverbial treadmill, right? A time to take your time, to digress, to meander, and not to be driven by a schedule. Or—is it a time when you realize how little time you may have left and how quickly its passage is accelerating? Perhaps mistakenly I have long believed the former. In these early days of my retirement I have been trying to do all of those things: to digress, to meander, to eschew schedules, and to take my time. Yet I harbor a fear that the latter may be closer to the truth. The days ahead are fewer than the days behind, and I have no reason to hope that the compression of the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years will abate.

Perhaps now is precisely the moment to make the greatest haste.