How to Slow Down Time
It is late August and the northern places have begun to transform with quiet, unassuming grace. The nights grow cool in the hills and a walk down the road, through the forest, or past a tangled hedgerow will reveal autumn’s early, subtle gains. Apples have begun to tumble from branches, splitting open in ditches and their bruised, tart-sweet perfume mingles with the crisp air. Sumac has begun to blush along the edges of the field as if the bees told it a risky joke. Goldenrod reigns over every field. The light has sharpened, no longer softened by June’s hazy gauze but instead casting crisp edges on leaves, stones, and weathered fences. The sky feels closer to November’s stark clarity than midsummer’s languid glow now. A faint browning creeps into the green, signaling the year’s inevitable turn toward more balanced days after summer’s wild sunlit bender. This is late August’s arrival, subtle and without ceremony, leaving most of us to ask “Where has the time gone?” It is a good question and we seem to remark on it often. People will tell you that time keeps speeding up for them as they age, that the days are long but the years are short. They ask “How did my children grow so big?” The days are so full, the weeks just float away and there is the ever-present lament of “I need more time.” They are common complaints and questions. Rarely do you hear that we can slow the turning of that old grindstone, however.
It seems to be a secret well kept, hiding in plain sight.
We can slow our perception of time. It is not arcane or difficult, but it does require practice that, like all good practices, eventually forms into a benevolent habit. The secret to slowing time is twofold: first in deliberate attention, in actively attempting to simply notice what is changing before you. Most people rush past the season’s signs, distracted by screens or lamenting summer’s end, only to find themselves at Labor Day or Halloween, asking, “Where did the time go?” Time can be stretched however, made to linger and burn slow like a well-tended fire, by noticing the small shifts that mark the turn. This, in part, is why it becomes important to attune yourself to a place, to stay there for a long time and become intimately familiar with its seasons and its signs. Do you know the birds at your feeder, the weeds in your ditch, where the moon rises over the ridge this time of year? Here in Vermont, late August has many little omens and signs: goldenrod fills the fields while asters bubble up from the ditches and roadsides, their purple and yellow blooms complimenting the fading green. Corn in the fiend stands tall, tassels dry and rustling, while dairy barns glow with the soft light of evening routines. We have lost over an hour of daylight since the summer solstice and those lights are now necessary. In the woods, the understory shifts; wood nettle fades, jewelweed scatters seeds, and birch leaves curl on the forest floor. Along roadsides milkweed pods are just beginning to split open, their silken threads catching the wind. Each day offers a detail, a small slow secret to anchor the moment if you but pause to gather it.
The second element you need to slow time may sound ironic. It is filling your days with good work. Imagine each day as a wooden chest placed on the riverbank. The river is time, always flowing, always pushing, apathetic to what it carries off. The chest is your days. A chest left empty is light; it is carried off easily, swept downstream before you have even marked its presence. That is how whole months can vanish unnoticed, how years slip past with the haunting sense that you never truly lived them. A chest that is filled with the weight of good work, of perennial tasks, of hours well-spent building, making, growing for your family cannot be rushed away. It settles into place, anchored by what you have placed inside with care. The day remains regardless of the rising river and its rushing insistence. You can prove this for yourself. Work a property hard for a single year on evenings, weekends, whenever the light allows, and by the following autumn it will feel as though you have been there for decades, even generations. The soil will know your hand, the fences your hammer, the animals your presence. This good work does not mean frantic busyness, nor endless striving, but rather keeping with the good green pattern of the world: tending bees, stacking wood, pruning apple trees, raising children. In the city you may achieve this as well, though it may not feel as intuitive. Instead of splitting wood, you may have more agency around the relationships you build or the initiatives you take to improve commonly held spaces like parks, or the old rituals of your faith you steward. Whatever the case may be, you place good weight in the chest through these acts. They belong to the perennial cycle, the tasks that root you in a place and in a rhythm beyond yourself.
Fill enough chests this way, and the river of time still flows, but you are no longer at its mercy.
The days remain along the bank, solid, waiting, part of a lasting pattern. The chest of each day is so full, so well-weighted with effort and care, that time itself seems to lengthen around you, yielding to and flowing around the chests you placed and filled. This is the gift of good work. It thickens life with a welcomed heaviness, a vigor that cannot be pushed and pulled by the whims of culture or time.
The modern world thrives on distraction, urging acceleration and feeding on the despair of time slipping away. It prefers you scroll rather than watch the moon rise over a quiet hill, count emails instead of fireflies flickering in the twilight, fight instead of love. This rush erodes the river bank while simultaneously causing you to forget to fill your chest, leaving it weightless. To slow down time is to resist this current, to live as though each day carries intrinsic value, as though the good green pattern of the world and its cycles of growth and decay, its fleeting moments of beauty, were drawn out for you to witness and build upon.
You can start simply.
Watch as the sky’s evening slides from gold to pink to gray, stars emerging one by one. Invite a neighbor over. Listen to the crickets. Remember an old tradition from your childhood, however mundane or sacred. Learn the smells of the season: cut grass cooling in the evening, apples softening in ditches, their ferment a promise of autumn. Notice a child’s laughter carrying across a field or the weight of their hand in yours. Keep a journal, even just a line, to note the first asters frothing up in the low places, the morning mist coiled in the valley, or a fox darting across your path. Writing these moments anchors the day, adding a little weight to the chest you keep at the river’s banks. Do this and you will not look back in November, startled, wondering where the season, the very year went. Instead when you fill each day’s chest with timeless things and good work you ensure it sits heavy in your memory, not lost to the flotsam and detritus of distraction. The practice of noticing is one of quiet rebellion, a choice to dwell in the present rather than race down the river toward the next milestone, to believe that each day matters.
The temptation this time of year is to grieve summer’s fading ease or allow the current to sweep you toward autumn’s glory, but the wiser path is to dwell here, in the thick and forgotten briar of the present, considering each day with intention. Walk the roadside and taste the tart bite of a wild apple. Cut a bouquet of whatever wildflowers remain for your table. Watch for small shifts: the first red leaf, the slant of light across a barn that was not there a week ago, the cool breath of evening. Let these acts ground you. They require no great effort, yet they imbue the days with an endurance otherwise lost.
Ultimately, we do not need more time. We simply need to pay attention.
So much wisdom and comfort in this essay.
“Ultimately, we do not need more time. We simply need to pay attention.”
Thank you for these timely words! (Yes pun intended, but true). I had bought the lie that it was too hard to slow down.