Living Fast and Slow

One of the things that I think humans get wrong the most is trying to make time consistent for everyone everywhere.

An hour for me may be the same hour for a Maasai community member or a Saudi princess, but we all experience time differently and personally.

My last hour won’t feel quite the same to me as yours did.

Consider the past two weeks.

On December 2, my father who was in an ICU started having trouble breathing.

Two days later, his family was gathering around him to say goodbye.

The next day, he said goodbye to all of us.

Two days after that was his funeral, and a brief period of mourning commenced.

Six days later, I started my first full-time job in three-and-a-half years.

I had a day where I was toggling between editing a press release about my job announcement and writing a eulogy for my father.

That’s not the conventional way to announce a new job; I’m now Mediaocean’s SVP Corporate Marketing and Communications. But it is a real way. Even my LinkedIn post about the update was in the form of a story, not a press release.

I’m not sure I’ve ever had a longer couple of weeks than the first half of this month.

What makes it especially long is the sheer number of people — people who’ve touched or inspired or been there for me in some way — who have reached out about one or both of these life updates.

Memory not only speeds up or slows down time, but it makes time travel possible.

Not only am I flooded with memories of my father, including several I belatedly wished I could have worked into the eulogy, but I have lots of work memories resurfacing too.

Many go back to when I met Mediaocean’s CMO Aaron Goldman and their CEO Bill Wise at MediaPost’s Search Insider Summits around 2004 and 2005. Those encounters, along with meeting COO Ben Kartzman at 360i’s office in 2008, led to this new career move. We were all in different roles at those times, and we could never have predicted where all this would lead.

The opportunity with Mediaocean came together very quickly. But it was 17 and 13 years in the making. Life moves fast, except when it moves slow.

Ever since I became a parent seven-and-five-sixths years ago (my little Aquarius keeps VERY good track of when her next birthday is), I started hearing one phrase over and over that started grating on me:

“It all goes by so fast!”

It sounded depressing. The person saying it might have meant well, but they were trying to press the fast-forward button when I was looking to go in slow-motion.

Worse still, it makes it sound like you can’t do anything about time.

I’ve found that I don’t feel that way, about time going by too fast or slow as a parent, because there’s a way to combat that.

It’s being so present that you feel like you can’t experience time any other way.

You are there with this other person – and this hardly needs to be your offspring – that time can’t work any differently.

With my father, there were years that I felt went by too slowly. Some stretches were difficult, especially when we couldn’t quite relate to each other the right way.

But there were some family dinners that I wish could have gone on for years. He was there in his element, holding court surrounded by family, often some fellows he invited from the hospital where he worked, and a table full of my mother’s cooking with recipes she learned from his own mother.

Those were some of the nights that I might have felt lasted too long when I was a kid. I wish I had the presence then to appreciate those moments.

Presence is the single best way to ensure time doesn’t feel like it goes too fast.

The presence of others has stretched my horizons of memory. There are memories of my father that feel like they’re part of me even though they occurred before I was born or at a time when I wasn’t with him. The memories of others inform my own and make time travel possible.

The notes of condolence and then congratulations stopped time for me. They made me so grateful for the gift of being present in the present.

And now I inherit a corporate memory. A business isn’t a person, but it comes with institutional knowledge, culture, and a reputation. As soon as one joins a business, you become part of that too. In my communications role at Mediaocean, I need to learn its voice, tone, and language.

In doing so, I will inherit some of its memories – like an actor taking on a new role and learning not just the lines they say but the story and memories behind all those lines.

Memory expands horizons. Presence deepens experiences.

Memories and presence can be learned. We can alter our experience of time. And when we share our memories and our presence, we can enrich others’ experiences too.

Thank you for all you’ve done by spending time with my words and me here. Your presence is felt, and it’s never meant more.

David

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• Time Affluence — A Gauge of Success by Benjamin Friedman

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