How slow can you go

evany
evany
Nov 5 · 4 min read

As parents, we’re often all too reminded about the swift creep of time. Well-meaning well-wishers love to stop and tell us to “cherish these moments” with our kids. “Before you know it, they’ll be teenagers and won’t want to cuddle or hold hands...basically they’ll be total sociopaths!” These comments always have the opposite effect on me. Instead of cherishing the moment, I just sit there stewing in a gut-punch of pregret (pre-regret).

I‘ve tried looking deep into my ten year old’s eyes and saying, “I cherish you,” but he writhes away in horror. I’ve tried swaddling him in a tight, circulation-stopping burrito and yelling, “Stop getting older!” but he just keeps growing.

The older we get, the faster time goes. As the math says, when you’re two years old, a year is 1/2 your life. When you’re 49, a year is…1/49th. And 1/2 is greater than 1/49. Time is just a fraction of what it once was.

Last week, I went to the offices of Dropbox to hear the lovely Chris Baty (of NaNoWriMo* fame) speak on a panel, and among the many smart things he said that night, what particularly stuck in my mindcraw was what he said about time and travel. How when you go on a trip, and you get so excited about all the new stuff you’re seeing and tasting and hearing, that you end up taking a million pictures “of a fire hydrant or something.” Probably no one else in the world wants to see those photos, but for you the whole experience is steeped in fascination and importance.

That thrill of discovering something new sparks something in us. As Chris says, it can even slow down our perception of time. Our brains like to save on storage space by only recording new info, and letting rote repetitive acts disappear down the braindrain.

My mother, too, was a big believer in this slowbrain theory, and would deliberately take different routes home, just to shake us free of the lull of a regular commute.

So this is what I’m doing. I’m trying something new: I’m going to slow down time by trying new things. And this past Saturday, I tried three new things.

First my husband Marco and I stumbled upon a Dia de los Muertos performance at the Sanchez Contemporary, four dancers in epic 3-foot feather head dresses, dancing and stomping out rhythms with heavy shell ankle bracelets. It was loud and incredible and very unexpected. A total unplanned gift of amazingness.

Then we tried our very first grapefruit palomas at Duende in uptown Oakland, a restaurant we’d never even heard of. The drinks were very tall and went down very right. While we sipped, we tried to guess where the people around us were headed next. Top hat and “my other ride’s a hot air balloon” waistcoat? Headed to the big-top circus burlesque show around the corner at the Dirty Dove tent (editor note: It’s actually called the Soiled Dove). Gray hair, flannel plaid and a dusty look in their eye? They were headed with us to the Lucinda Willams show next door at the Fox Theater.

I’ve never seen Lucinda Williams play before, and I don’t know much about her. Marco has tried playing me her CDs over the years and I’ve always been like, meh. But he’s a big fan and really wanted to go, and we’re all married and stuff, so I sighed and came along.

She was glorious. So great. Every song she sang, she started by telling the story behind why she wrote it, in her charming where-the-hell-is-this-headed Louisiana drawl. The chili-cooking ex-boyfriend who knew where to get the world’s best jambalaya and who died at 42. The bass player ex-boyfriend who cried on the floor with a 12-pack of Bud when she left him for another bass player. The time her poet father told her he was sorry.

All through each song, a slideshow of old photos played behind her, the faces of the characters in her life. The stories brought the music to such a heart-deep place, I just smiled and cried and smiled the whole night through. And those songs will never be meh to me again. When I hear them now, they’ve got all that living attached them, like a direct pavlovian HTML link back to this past Saturday night.

When the singing and stories were over, we BARTed home, thanked our babysitting friends Adrienne and Avery who’d gifted us with this night of new, and I went in and snuzzled up to my sleeping kid and gave him a big wet kiss right on his still-little face.

Altogether it was a very slow night.

*Fun fact: The first time I met Chris Baty, a handful of years ago, the very first thing I said to him was that I always get his NaNoWriMo movement (National Novel Writing Month—AKA November) confused with NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association). And he was still very nice to me! This most recent time we met, I told him I thought he should combine NaNoWriMo with Movember (the mustache-growing charity initiative). They would call it NaNoWriMovember! And then I went on a real ramble about how they could do scientific studies to see if writing helps mustaches grow faster, or maybe it slows down hair growth? Because the energy behind facial hair comes from the same well as what fuels writing? And Chris was still, still very nice to me.

evany
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