We’ve all heard the old saying – time flies. It doesn’t matter if you’re having fun, or going through hell, time goes by at the exact same pace. 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour, and 24 hours per day, and unless you count areas that still recognize daylight savings time, this doesn’t change. Why then, do some days fly by, and others seem to drag on. Why do some parts of our lifetime seem like they lasted an eternity, but others go by so fast that we wouldn’t remember them if it weren’t for photos. It’s an interesting thought.

This wasn’t just any drive

I took a drive today. Not long, just a 3 hour drive for a work related meeting. In my neck of the woods this is not a significant journey – it’s not short by any means, but it’s nothing to write home about. I’ve driven 15 hours straight before to visit family, and when I first started dating my wife, we travelled about 6 hours away on a regular basis to visit her family and friends. Compare to these, my 3 hour commute today was nothing…and that’s my point. But, this wasn’t just any drive. This trip took me down roads that I used to travel regularly on my way to and from university – 20 years ago. Not much has changed, and each community took me back to that path that had become so familiar, even though it’s been many years. I can remember the first time I drove to school, thinking to myself that I would never be able to return home, as it was so far away. The actual drive to my school was just under 2 hours, and if you take into account the considerable speed that my tuned out Dodge Neon was capable of at the time, the drive was….well, it was still 2 hours….it was a Neon, after all. So, how did a drive that once seemed like an eternity become just another commute? The roads aren’t shorter. The speed limits haven’t changed. What was going on?

Summer break seemed to go on forever

Let’s take the concept of drive time and apply it to every day life. Do you remember when you were a child and your summer break seemed to go on forever, providing you with a seemingly infinite amount of time to hang out with friends, and rest up before a new school year – which also seemed never ending? Think about your birthday, special holidays, or special occasions that happened once per year, and try to recall how you longed for these events that often seemed a lifetime away. If you celebrate Christmas, do you remember the feeling afterwards when you realized that it would be an unbearable 365 days before it came again? How was it fair that time went by so slowly!?

Now, this is the part where anyone under the age of 25 reading this may not have hit this point in life yet, but I would say, with confidence, that most over that milestone have started to notice that the years start to go by much quicker. The seasons that used to seem like years now go by in an instant, and years go by like seasons. If you have kids, take a look at them now, and then look back at old photos – where did that time go?

I was sure that the friends I made were going to be part of my life forever

Back to my drive. Things really started to become interesting when I thought about my previous journeys to and from university. I spent 6 years in total between university and college, and I remember thinking to myself how these must be the most important years of my life. I was sure that the friends I made were going to be part of my life forever, and we’d all created unbreakable bonds. Of the hundreds of people I met over those years, I remain a close friends with one or two, but with the help of social media, I haven’t forgotten about many of the others. While we may not keep in touch, they still remain important memories, people I won’t soon forget, and we may meet again. I actually saw a friend from university at an NHL hockey game a couple weeks ago. It was in the distance, and we didn’t have a chance to chat, but I remember thinking to myself – wow, we haven’t spoken in 20 years, but there we were, in a crowd of twenty thousand fans, living our post-education lives, and to be honest, that person looked like they hadn’t changed a bit….and hopefully I haven’t aged that much either. The point is, 20 years had gone by and look at all that had happened in that time – new family members, lost family members, children, careers, new friends, and so on. It is incredible what seems to have happened overnight, but it was an astonishing 20 years!

Do you ever find yourself starting your week thinking, “okay, I only have to get through the next 5 days and it’s the weekend?” For the shift workers out there, do you fight your way through your toughest stretch of shifts with the sole purpose of reaching your stretch of days off at the end? Think about how many times you’ve done this, and while the weekends or the days off at the end might be satisfying and well deserved, did you force yourself to skim through the days between on autopilot just to get there? What did you miss? Did you give each day your all? Did you find opportunities to enjoy and find positivity in each day, or did you simply exist through those days in an effort to make it to the weekend?

Be motivated by finding opportunities to cherish each day

It’s okay to look forward to a day off, a weekend, or an upcoming vacation/special event, but if we cruise through the rest of our life for the sole purpose of reaching these days, we are missing so much. Do this for weeks, months, and potentially years at a time, and imagine how much of our life we will miss. Take a moment and think back on the last year of your life – did you truly LIVE each day, including the hard days, or is your memory just a series of weekends and special occasions lumped together into a short memory? We need goals to strive for. We need milestones to reach. This is what motivates us. But, we can also be motivated by finding opportunities to cherish each day, each moment, and each memory. And even when the days don’t go our way, we can find opportunities to learn from them and make the next day better.

As I sit in my hotel room and write this it’s clear that the key takeaway is to slow down and enjoy life, and this is true, but I also can’t help but think to myself “wow, that drive went by fast.”