Being a parent forces you to constantly be aware of the passage of time. Your life runs to the rhythm of school years and holidays and sports seasons and annual checkups. Parents feel it, and kids feel it too. I don't know how many times my kids have said they can't wait for this day or that trip or alternately, that they don't want summer to be over or to grow up too fast.
If you haven't seen this video about the girl who doesn't want her baby brother to grow up because he's just sooo cute, it hits you in two layers. The first is how adorable she is (and she's right about her baby brother). But there's also a deeper undercurrent of the pain we share with her of wanting to stop time.
I recently read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Tolle explains the difference between clock time and psychological time. Clock time is what you use to function day to day, to get places on time and do what you need to do. Psychological time is the attachment you feel to the past or the future, anything that is pulling you away from the moment you are in right now. Psychological time can bring suffering because you are either comparing now to the past and finding it lacking, or you feel that you need something in the future to make you happier.
The girl who doesn't want her baby brother to grow up was experiencing the pain of living on psychological time. I see it in my own life as well. I am flooded with old emails that I don't want to get rid of in case there's an important memory I'll lose. I sometimes feel sad when I look at family pictures, even though they are from happy events, because I long to relive them or to be younger (or especially to see my kids be younger again).
When we hold on to the past like this, we are depriving ourselves of the opportunity to fully experience the present. By lamenting about how short the summer seems or how quickly a vacation passes, you are robbing the event of its enjoyment by anticipating its end. If you are a planner like I am, you might spend a lot of your present time with your thoughts on the future. People say I'm "organized," or but it's really a form of anxiety about things that haven't happened yet.
Since reading Tolle's book and watching Sadie cry over her baby brother, I am trying to keep re-centering myself in the present moment, to stop dwelling on the past and worrying about the future. I hope that my kids see a difference in my attentiveness toward them and that they too practice living in the now.
As Oogway says to Po in Kung Fu Panda, "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present."