How Alain De Botton’s Densification of Time Can Lengthen Our Lives.
2015 was one of the saddest of my life as my mother passed away. However, it was also one of the most exciting years of my life, as I had intentionally set it up to be so. I wanted to do more joyful activities that made me release the handbrake within me, allowing me to express more of myself.
It was a remarkable year and remains etched in my mind and heart.
Contrary to what I’d thought, time didn’t move quickly; instead, it dragged unhurriedly.
Till today, I can recall most of the experiences of that year as if they happened last week.
I can still feel the heat from the hot coal I walked on with my son when we attended Tony Robbins’s four-day event, “Unleash the Power Within,” in London.
I still recall the joy of visiting my then mentor — Kahlil Gibran’s mausoleum in Bsharii, Lebanon, after spending the previous months reading and getting inspired by the Lebanese-American writer, poet, and philosopher who explained life’s most searching questions with simple, lyrical prose.
There was also the small matter of my TEDx Accra talk in April, which, till today, makes my knees wobble with both fear and excitement.
Time is just a strange dimension. It feels longer, denser and more intense when we do novel and meaningful stuff.
So we need to ask ourselves not how many years we can add to our lives but how we can slow it down so that we live more fully, intensely and meaningfully.
Alain de Botton makes the point more eloquently:
“One of the most basic facts about time is that, even though we insist on measuring it as if it were an objective unit, it doesn’t, in all conditions, seem to be moving at the same pace. Five minutes can feel like an hour; ten hours can feel like five minutes. A decade may pass like two years; two years may acquire the weight of half a century. And so on. In other words, our subjective experience of time bears precious little relation to the way we like to measure it on a clock. Time moves more or less slowly according to the vagaries of the human mind: it may fly, or it may drag; it may evaporate into airy nothing or achieve enduring density.”
Exercise, sleep, and good eating habits could make us live longer. Still, more importantly, they support us in living a better quality of life.
However, the true secret to enjoying our time on earth is to mimic our childhood, when everything is new, exciting and possible.
We want to replace the drudgery, familiarity, and comfort we seem to have after childhood with more novelty, adventure, and self-expression.
De Botton explains: “The more our days are filled with new, unpredictable, and challenging experiences, the longer they will feel. And, conversely, the more one day is exactly like another, the faster it will pass by in a blur.”
True, we can celebrate centenarians from Okinawa and other Blue Zone areas and learn from their good habits to live longer lives. We can also eulogise great people like Alexander the Great and wonder how his life must have been after conquering the world at 32.
However, life is not always about being glorious and attempting incredible feats like scaling Mount Everest, swimming across the English Channel, or creating a billion-dollar company.
Instead, we need to become artists and notice properly with our eyes open, savouring time.
We might live to be a hundred and still feel it all went too fast. Instead, we must aim to fill our days with adventure, appreciation, and awe that children naturally understand.
Not only must we become more mindful of our lives, noticing and appreciating life, but also follow creative pursuits. Self-expression, creativity, and writing for me make me sit up and notice life much more.
Writing in my journal daily allows me to think not only of my place in life but also of life in general. It slows me down, allowing me to pause and remember people’s faces, hear what they said and feel what they felt.
I can picture the black crows circling in the sky with extraordinary vividness.
I can notice the different phases of the moon. The sunsets. The density of the clouds.
Most importantly, when I’m writing, I dare to ask questions that connect me to my soul and to something much larger than myself — a humbling experience that is both grounding and illuminating.
If you want to live longer, eat kale, sleep 8 hours, exercise every day, but also start noticing the wonders of this world.
