Felt Experience
Days versus Years (336/365)
These last days I’ve been asking Perplexity to help me with ideas on what to write about.
Yesterday, I feed it with This Ember (as the post’s title), and begged for ideas. Here are two of the ideas I got back:
The feeling that December “should” be big and dramatic vs. how most days are small, ordinary embers of attention, energy, and care.
I like the idea of considering days ordinary embers of attention, energy, and care, opportunities to take care of ourselves and of others.
I continued reading. For another recommendation, Perplexity used (96/365) Running out of ideas, an April post, as a source:
How daily writing has kept a small fire going all year, even when you were running out of ideas and what it means to arrive at the last stretch with the flame still on.
The flame still on! I loved this last part, and used it to close yesterday’s post.
My attention redirected my memory to a phrase I wrote in a September 2005 post from the original Mondoli where I complain about boring law school was, a disappointment compared to the creative journey I thought it would be:
Las clases son largas y los días son largos. Sin embargo, he escuchado que los días son cortos. ¿¡Los días... CORTOS!?
Translation:
The classes are long and the days are long. However, I have heard that the days are short. The days… SHORT!?
Then my mind went to that other phrase:
The days are long, but the years are short,
a phrase I knew I had either heard or read before, but couldn’t remember where.
After Googling it, I saw that Gretchen Rubin, an American author, was the first one to put in paper (at least according to Google) in her 2009 book The Happiness Project.
I went to my Amazon account and saw that I owned that book. I don’t remember if I finished it though.
The book is a self-help book where Rubin writes about trying to become happier in her everyday life without dramatically changing much.
(Which leads me to: omg, is Mondoli self-help? I hope not!)
But what does Rubin means with
The days are long, but the years are short?
I’m not motivated enough to re-read her book. Here’s my interpretation.
Because it’s not easy to remember how tired we felt in, say, 2005, or in January, but we can definitely sense how tired we feel today we tend to perceive a specific day (today) as long, even insufferable, especially when you have to endure something difficult like a long flight, a long que, a terrible day at work, or a sleepless night.
Months and years go by in pairs, groups of five, or even tens, and sometimes you wonder if you really went through them, or if you just skipped them.
(Like, wth with the year 2021? Did it even exist?)
In this sense, days can feel eternal while years can seem like half-remembered instants. We judge stuff, ideas, people, statements, according to how we feel during what is considered felt experience, according to this New Yorker text:
The duration of felt experience is between two and three seconds—about as long as it takes, the psychologist Marc Wittmann points out, for Paul McCartney to sing the words “Hey Jude.”
Everything before belongs to memory; everything after is anticipation. It’s a strange, barely fathomable fact that our lives are lived through this small, moving window.
Anyway.
I need to end this senseless text: I’m on the train and about to get to Philly. The talk in NYC went amazing! Met cool people and felt that the content / delivery was well received by the audience.
As I was walking back to the subway, I got this video from outside the NYSE:
#day336