Rory Fitzgerald
Time is our most precious commodity. As we get older, the years pass by like days. Suddenly, it’s 2018 – which is strange, since just yesterday it was 2008, or 1998 or perhaps even 1968 – depending on how long you’ve been around. For us adults, time passes quickly, and we don’t change dramatically from year to year. Our slide into decrepitude is slow and imperceptible.
For children, a year is an eternity. Everything about them changes in that time. Their height, their abilities, their skills, their understanding of the world and their emotional acuity all undergo complete metamorphoseses.
Looking back at photos taken just two or three years ago, it’s obvious that the kids have changed completely. My heart aches to see the disappearance of those small, babyish faces, never to return. Yet how exciting to see these innocents replaced with the more knowing – but no less happy – faces of big boys and girls. I can already now see glimpses of the adults to come.
Our world is undergoing changes, like a child growing rampantly. Each year brings new politicial and technological realities, which are amazing and unsettling in equal measure. I interviewed one of the first men to walk on the moon a few years back. Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell told me: “My great grandparents came across the southern United States after the Civil War in the 1870s to start a new life in the western territories. They were in a covered wagon drawn by horses, driving a few cattle to start a new herd.
Electric light
“The railroads had not been completed, automobiles had not been invented, the electric light had not been invented. My father was born shortly after the Wright brothers made the first airplane flight – and I went to the moon…In less than 100 years we went from covered wagons to going to the moon.” The incredible process of change he witnessed is only accelerating in our time.
Much of this change is exciting. In our house, I we speak to devices, and they will put on the radio, turn on the lights, turn up the heating, or make a video call, as instructed. This was in the province of science fiction just ten or twenty years ago.
I asked the television to play The Wizard of Oz for the children the other day. It obliged. Although released in 1939, the kids loved that movie as if it were the latest Netflix offering. I remember watching it as a kid their age, as did my own parents in the 1950s. In some ways, little has changed, and yet everything has changed.
Devices
So much has changed for the better, yet our new technological devices with their sparkling addictive always-available entertainment are absorbing our minds and our energies – and, above all, our time. People spend much of their lives online, in social media realities where interactions and “likes” provide addictive dopamine hits. I’ve recently read that scientists have found that overuse of technology can alter people’s perception of time.
This means that if we are too engaged in our smartphones, time really does fly by. This provides me with a huge incentive to unplug more, and to redouble my efforts to keep the kids screen time to a minimum. The days of childhood are finite, and that special time of life should be savoured. We parents need to be with them, not merely bodily, but mentally present and attentive to them, and their stories and their small needs.
My New Year’s resolution is therefore to unplug and switch off devices more often. Each day, and each hour, is precious and I want to be in it. I want to slow down time, and savour each moment.