If you want to know how long two minutes really is, hold a plank.

Not a casual plank where your back is six inches in the air and you're checking your watch every twelve seconds.

A real one.

Elbows down. Back flat. Core tight.

Now wait.

At thirty seconds, you will become aware of time.

At sixty, you will develop an intimate relationship with it.

At ninety, you will begin negotiating with God.

And somewhere around 1:47, you will discover something remarkable. . .

Two minutes is a very long time.

This is useful information.

I've been thinking a lot about how quickly life seems to be moving lately.

I'm 51.

And I'm beginning to understand that one of the strangest things about getting older isn't simply that you have less time ahead of you.

It's that time seems to move faster.

Summers that once felt endless disappear.

Christmas seems to arrive every nine months.

You run a few errands on Monday and somehow it's Thursday.

Years begin behaving like months.

And we're told this is simply what happens.

Time flies.

Life is short.

Enjoy it while you can.

Okay.

But I've started wondering whether we surrender too easily to that idea.

Because I've noticed something.

Time doesn't always move quickly.

Sometimes it moves painfully slowly.

Hold a plank.

Run the last five minutes of a hard treadmill session.

Do the final three reps of a set you didn't think you could finish.

Have your heart broken.

Take on a project slightly beyond your abilities and spend several weeks wondering whether you've finally discovered the precise limits of your competence.

Ask me how I know.

These experiences have almost nothing in common.

Except this. . .

You are completely there for them.

And that has changed the way I think about time.

Let's get the obvious problem out of the way.

You cannot actually slow time.

Sixty seconds is sixty seconds.

Your 52nd birthday will arrive exactly one year after your 51st whether you spend that year climbing mountains or watching Netflix.

But there is another kind of time.

Experienced time.

And experienced time is wildly elastic.

Two hours can disappear.

Two minutes can feel enormous.

We've all experienced both.

Which means the question isn't really, ‘How do I get more time?’

It's, ‘How do I experience more of the time I'm already getting?’

That is a different question.

And I think I know part of the answer.

Presence slows time.

Not because the clock changes.

Because you stop disappearing from your own life.

Modern life is extraordinarily efficient at helping us avoid experiencing it.

Think about what we've engineered away.

Waiting.

Boredom.

Getting lost.

Silence.

Inconvenience.

Uncertainty.

We don't even have to wonder what song is playing anymore.

A computer knows.

We don't have to figure out where we're going.

A computer knows.

We don't have to decide what movie we might like.

A computer knows.

We don't have to sit in a restaurant waiting for a friend without entertainment because apparently seven unoccupied minutes would now constitute a humanitarian crisis.

So we reach for the phone.

And time disappears.

That's the strange bargain we've made.

We've eliminated enormous amounts of friction from our lives.

And in the process, we may have eliminated enormous amounts of felt life.

You can lose an entire Saturday scrolling, streaming, ordering food and generally being comfortable.

Nothing particularly unpleasant happens.

Nothing particularly difficult happens.

Nothing particularly memorable happens.

Sunday morning arrives and Saturday barely seems to have existed.

Now compare that with another Saturday.

You drive somewhere you've never been.

You hike ten miles.

You get lost.

You get rained on.

You swim in water cold enough to make you reconsider several recent decisions.

You cook dinner outside.

You laugh with someone you love.

You crawl into bed exhausted.

Same twenty-four hours.

Completely different amount of life.

This is where I've begun developing an appreciation for certain kinds of difficulty.

Not suffering for suffering's sake.

I'm not recommending you smash your thumb with a hammer every Tuesday because you're concerned September is moving too quickly.

I'm talking about good hard things.

Physical effort.

Learning.

Adventure.

Creation.

Discomfort voluntarily entered.

Anything requiring enough of you that you cannot be somewhere else while doing it.

The gym does this beautifully.

The last few reps slow down.

The last mile slows down.

The plank becomes geological time.

Your body drags your mind into the present.

There is no doomscrolling while fighting for rep eleven.

There is only rep eleven.

And there are other hard things we don't choose.

Heartbreak taught me this.

There were nights when I would have gladly accepted a button marked SKIP AHEAD SIX MONTHS.

Just get me there.

Get me to healed.

Get me to okay.

Get me to the morning when this doesn't hurt anymore.

But even then, somewhere underneath the pain, I recognized something.

Time had slowed.

My life had become extraordinarily vivid.

A night was a night again.

A week was enormous.

I noticed things.

I thought deeply.

I walked.

I wrote.

I sat alone.

I hurt.

I was completely present for a period of my life I desperately wanted to escape.

And somehow I found gratitude for that.

Not gratitude that my heart was broken.

Gratitude that I wasn't missing it.

Because this was my life too.

The painful parts count.

Maybe especially the painful parts.

So when life hands you something brutally difficult, I'm not going to insult you by suggesting you enjoy it.

But occasionally, while you're inside it, look around.

Notice how slowly the clock is moving.

Someday this chapter will be over.

And strange as it sounds, there may be things about the man you were required to become inside it that you will miss.

Thankfully, suffering isn't the only way I've found to slow time.

Sometimes I do absolutely nothing.

Most mornings I wake early.

I make coffee.

And before the machinery of the day comes online, I sit.

No agenda.

No productivity.

No optimization.

My eyes wander around the room.

I watch the morning arrive.

Thoughts appear.

Thoughts leave.

The monkey climbs onto his little control panel and begins flipping switches.

And I drink my coffee.

Nothing happens.

That's precisely the point.

Those minutes feel full.

Not because they're filled with activity.

Because I'm there for them.

This has convinced me that difficulty isn't actually what slows experienced time.

Attention does.

Difficulty simply forces attention.

Stillness invites it.

Adventure captures it.

Love commands it.

Pain refuses to let it leave.

There are many doors into presence.

A man should learn which ones work for him.

This realization has also changed the way I talk about time.

I used to say things everybody says.

I'll make time.

I'll find the time.

I don't have time.

I've mostly stopped.

Because they're bullshit.

You cannot make time.

There is no workshop in your garage where you can manufacture an additional Thursday.

And you probably aren't going to find any either.

Nobody has ever reached between the couch cushions and discovered a spare afternoon.

What you can do is allocate it.

You can take time.

Protect time.

Give time.

Waste time.

Spend time.

But mostly, you decide what deserves it.

That distinction changed something for me.

Instead of, ‘One day I'll make time to work out three or four days a week.’

Try, ‘One day I will decide that taking care of my body is important enough to occupy space on my calendar.’

Those are not the same sentence.

Friends occasionally tell me:

"We really need to find time to get together."

No.

We don't.

We need to decide that seeing each other matters enough to choose a Tuesday.

Put it on the calendar.

Tuesday exists.

Mystery solved.

This is uncomfortable because "I don't have time" protects us from having to admit something.

Much of the time, what we really mean is, ‘I have not made this important enough.’

That's okay.

Everything cannot be important.

But at least tell yourself the truth.

Because your calendar is one of the most brutally honest documents you own.

It records what your life is actually about.

Not what you say it's about.

So I've begun thinking about my life differently.

I don't just want longevity.

I want density.

I want years I actually inhabit.

And there are some ways I've learned to create them.

Do hard things voluntarily.

Use your body.

Go somewhere unfamiliar.

Learn things you're bad at.

Create something whose outcome you cannot guarantee.

Sit quietly without reaching for entertainment.

Leave occasional spaces in your life unfilled.

Spend time with people you genuinely love.

When someone matters, choose the Tuesday.

When something difficult arrives, don't spend every second begging for it to be over.

And occasionally do absolutely nothing except notice that you are alive.

These aren't productivity hacks.

They're almost the opposite.

They're ways of refusing to rush through your own existence.

Because that's the danger.

We spend enormous portions of our lives asking the present moment to hurry.

Get me through this workout.

Get me through this project.

Get me through this heartbreak.

Get me through this winter.

Get me to Friday.

Get me to summer.

Get me to the promotion.

Get me to retirement.

And then eventually a man looks around and asks, ‘Where the hell did my life go?’

Well.

You spent a surprising amount of it asking time to hurry.

I don't want to do that anymore.

I know the clock is running.

I know there are fewer summers ahead of me than behind me.

I know I cannot negotiate another twenty years into existence simply because I've finally become wise enough to appreciate them.

But perhaps longevity isn't the only lever available to us.

Perhaps we can become better at inhabiting what remains.

We can put the phone down.

Choose the difficult thing.

Take the trip.

Lift the weight.

Sit with the coffee.

Call the friend.

Choose the Tuesday.

Stay inside the uncomfortable moment a little longer instead of constantly wishing ourselves into the next one.

Pay attention.

Because maybe the great challenge of the second half of life isn't figuring out how to live forever.

Maybe it's learning how to stop disappearing from the life we're already living.

You cannot make time.

You cannot find time.

And you cannot stop it.

But you can be there when it passes.