How Did I Get Here?

Fifteen minutes ago you were at a high school football game. You blinked and found yourself with a mortgage, a diaper genie, and an Udder-Buddy for cream. You blinked and 20, 30, or 40 years went by.

Yes, life goes by fast. And, as we get older, it seems like time speeds up. So, is it true? Does life really speed up as we age? Unfortunately, the answer is yes (and no).

Of course, the clock and calendar don’t really speed up. But, our perspective of time can make it feel faster. When we follow consistent patterns day after day, our brains essentially go on autopilot. These periods leave fewer distinct memory traces, making large chunks of time feel like they’ve “disappeared” in retrospect.

Plus, we tend to remember events from high school and college more vividly than later stages. As we age, more of life falls outside of this prominently remembered time-period.

The irony about these moments of temporal disorientation is that life is never truly constant. We don’t remain in the same place, doing the same thing, for very long.

And yet, here’s the paradox: even though life constantly shifts, it often feels like nothing changes. We don’t notice the transformation until we’re miles down the road.

The problem isn’t that life moves too fast—it’s that we rarely feel it moving until it’s already past us.

Perhaps the deeper irony is that, for many of us, the life we have today is precisely the life we envisioned yesterday. As humans—and particularly as Americans—we’re always striving toward something just beyond our reach. The horizon keeps moving, and we rarely feel we’ve arrived at that elusive state of contentment.

However, life doesn’t happen in a big bang. It happens slowly, over time. You don’t just become a parent overnight. It’s a slow build-up of dating, marriage, planning, and waiting. “Becoming” always happens in hindsight.

Life is a gradual process that makes it difficult to truly appreciate where you are once you arrive. Even those surprise babies take nine months to cook.

When we were younger, the school day never seemed to end. The weekend was always light years away. Special events crawled toward us at a snail’s pace. At times, it seemed almost cruel.

The slowest time of my life was the six months before I got my driver’s license. But, I’ve been driving for 40 years now, and that time span moved by in an instant.

This phenomenon has a scientific explanation. Psychologists call it the “proportional theory of time perception.” When you’re ten years old, a year represents 10% of your entire life experience—it feels substantial and weighty. But when you’re fifty, that same calendar year accounts for just 2% of your lived experience. The relative significance diminishes, and thus, time seems to accelerate.

That’s why childhood summers stretched endlessly. Each day was an adventure unfolding at its own leisurely pace. Now, entire seasons blur together in what feels like mere weeks. Tax day comes around again just as you’ve finished filing last year’s return. Wasn’t it just Christmas? How is it already Easter again?

We experience two perspectives on time. Prospectively, time moves at a snail’s pace. Retrospectively, it appears to have moved at the speed of light. Perhaps this dichotomy exists to give us a greater appreciation for where we are going than for where we’ve been.

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There’s something kinda sad about time speeding up, but also something to learn from it. Maybe the real shame isn’t life moving too fast, but that we waste so much of it focusing on the next thing.

I spent an entire career dreaming of the freedom of retirement. Now, as it nears, I find myself nostalgic about all the relationships and experiences of my career.

It seems we are always rehearsing for tomorrow instead of living for today. The old Zen saying nails it: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

Before enlightenment, those tasks might feel like a grind, something to “get through” on your way to something better. After enlightenment, there’s no grind. There is simply peace in the daily routine.

When happiness is perpetually tied to some future outcome, we miss the majority of our lives waiting for perfect moments that continually recede over the horizon.

Perhaps wisdom isn’t escaping the everyday but immersing ourselves in it, recognizing the extraordinary nature of our ordinary existence.

Consider that the odds of your existence on earth is equivalent to a single grain of sand on all the beaches in the world.

So, maybe instead of wondering “How did I get here?” we should just appreciate being “here”. We can’t slow time down, but we can dive deeper into it. Notice more. Rush less. Appreciate the everyday miracles we usually race past.

Funny how it works: when we stop wishing time away, when we quit straining toward some imagined future, we often find that life—messy and imperfect as it is—was never something to endure but something to live, one precious moment at a time.

In the end, we don’t just arrive somewhere. We become everything we’ve been, every moment we’ve lived—the amazing and the mundane. That journey, with all its weird detours and surprises—that’s where the meaning hides.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

See, we eventually get where we’re going. By and large, it’s typically where we’re supposed to be.

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