Give Yourself Time To Love, Be, Enjoy, Think, Feel …
The best time of your life is always now. Yesterday has already happened and the future does not yet exist, so take a breath, breathe and open that gaze located right in the center of your heart. Give yourself time to love and love yourself as you deserve, time to think and feel the warm caress of this present that will never be repeated again.
William James, famous philosopher and psychologist specializing in mental health, wrote about the perception of time in one of his books: “Psychology: The Briefer Course.” In it, he explained a fact that many will be familiar with: as we get older we have the clear feeling that time passes much faster. It is almost like a fleeting blink, something peculiar and even terrifying.
According to James, this is mainly due to the fact that when we age, events as memorable as in those years of youth where everything is new (that first love, that trip, that job, a new house, a new child…) no longer occur. Also, life sometimes, whether we like it or not, becomes a little more routine. Our daily life is part of a slow and repetitive movement where we see, do and experience the same things, the same events.
Little by little, the brain, lacking significant stimuli, enters a destructive spiral where our neurochemistry changes, where memory begins to fail and awareness of time becomes imprecise. Something that undoubtedly could be avoided in a simple way if we were able to give new approaches to the movie of our lives.
It would only be about breaking routines, getting out of that existential fog to cling to the present and nourish it with significant events. It’s easier than it sounds: we suggest you reflect on it.
Your brain has a strange conception of time
We have all heard of mindfulness. This approach has been applied successfully to clinical psychology for some years, in order to self-regulate attention, to accept what is in the present, and in turn, to expand our fields of action in order to act in a more creative way in harmony with our values.
Now, there is one aspect that is interesting to know about this topic: it does not work for everyone and it is not as easy to apply as it seems at first. Beyond the clinical field, there are many people who want to get started in Mindfulness, soon realizing that it does not serve them, that they cannot integrate these methods or enhance that vital approach.
This is because our brain has a strange conception of time, or rather, of the present. Bob Nease is a social scientist and systems engineer very interested in the human mind. With his book ” The Power of Fifty Bits” he explained to us that our brain is not designed to keep our attention on a specific aspect, on a single focus of interest. Our senses, our instincts, do not understand present, future or past time, they understand survival.
The human mind lives suspended in an automatic pilot with a tendency to fixate on multiple stimuli at the same time to process risks, to keep us safe. Focusing our attention on a few would mean neglecting other stimuli that the brain considers important. Therefore .
Let us therefore learn to synchronize obligations with needs, leisure with duties to gradually shape a happiness free of fear, a present without the bitterness of the past and free from the anguish of the future. Let us give the one we love the most that tribute that is neither sold nor bought: TIME.
