Day 25

“The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
-Eden Phillpotts

Day 25 –  I remember from my 3-month-long trip to Italy, Croatia, and Slovenia a few years ago, that time slows down when you’re traveling.

An article on Lifehacker explains:

The reason is simple: the longer it takes for our brain to process information, the longer the period of time feels. So, when the brain isn’t doing a lot of processing, like, say, on your commute to work that never changes, the time it took to do so doesn’t feel that long. One study from the Journal of Consumer Psychology suggests that the more attention we pay to an event, the longer the interval of time feels. Another study from the Journal of the Association for Psychological Science had similar findings.

I’ve been thinking lately about events and encounters that slow down time. They feel like little bursts of life happening beyond our ability to understand them. My ex used to make fun of me when we’d go for our evening walk, because I’d wax on about the smell of jasmine or passion fruit or even the subtle shift at the start of a season’s change. But the more I breathed in, it expanded the breadth of the moment.

Practicing mindfulness, even the act of listening to your breath going in and out, is like holding a microscope up to the moment, so that everything that looked smooth is actually an intricate latticework, built not just of the thing itself, but of its history and every influence that makes it what it is now.

Like I said once in a poem, “Objects are solid and moving beneath.”