The Pace of Life

[

THIS

ARTICLE

WAS

PUBLISHED

REDICTION

MAGAZINE

, F

EBRUARY

1998

]IS ETERNAL YOUTH JUST A PIPE DREAM? OR CAN WE SLOW THE AGEING PROCESS?If you are seeking the elixir of youth and have tried diets, exercises and vitamins which promisedmore than they delivered, maybe you will find the secret of eternal youth within your mind. The keyto slowing the ageing process could be how we perceive time. Time is not a universal mechanicalconsistency but is unique for each of us. We can speed it up or slow it down by the way we thinkand behave. Hard to believe? Tai Chi Chuan is a martial art and exercise which allows thepractitioner to glimpse the flexibility and personal nature of time. The secret is slowness. Unlikemost martial arts where the beginner starts the movements slowly and builds up speed, Tai ChiChuan works in the opposite way; the ultimate aim is to perform the solo form very slowly. It isduring the solo form that the Tai Chi Chuan practitioner often experiences a curious sensation oftime. When I began practising Tai Chi Chuan I took about fifteen minutes to complete the solo formand it seemed that the time went on forever. But now t wenty years later the form takes me aroundhalf an hour and when I glance at the clock immediately afterwards I am amazed how quickly thetime has elapsed. Where does the thirty minutes go? And why is it that the slower I move the fastertime seems to fly?Would someone not practising Tai Chi Chuan perceive the same 30 minute period going just as fastas I had? Or, as Einstein theorised, does time pass at a different rate for each of us according to ourstate of mind? It if does then that could be the reason why two people the same age can look olderor younger than one another by up to twenty years. Could it be that people for whom timehabitually passes quickly age more slowly than those for whom time seems to drag? I haveexperienced time `speed-ups' quite often. I remember one evening when I was a teenager beingengrossed playing the piano and composing. I got up to prepare my bedtime drink (expecting it tobe around ten thirty) and suddenly felt stiff. When I glanced at the clock I had the shock of my lifewhen I saw it was two in the morning! It was as though I had been transported foreword in time -three hours had just vanished! Another curious thing was that I was so engrossed in my composingthat I didn't notice the stiffness and pain accumulating in my joints from sitting too long in place till

I came back into sync with `normal' time.A few years later while working as a cook in a restaurant there I had a rush of customers at about10.30 pm. All I remember was a frantic blur of activity for what I thought was half an hour or so.But when the rush finished and I looked at my watch it showed ten to one in the morning!Curiously, most people remark that I look around ten or fifteen years younger than my age. Is it acoincidence that I have frequently experienced time speeding up? A friend of mine who is 27 isoften mistaken for man of forty; he weighs 14 stone, is balding and often complains that time“drags”. Yet I am the one who is 40 years old; I also have to hunt for grey hairs, still weigh 8 stoneand some people even mistake me for a student! (more of a social embarrassment than bravado).So what is happening with my friend myself? Is the secret of ageing merely set in our genes beforewe are born or can we effect the ageing process by how we behave and think? To discover whypeople age at different rates we could explore a simple analogy of two men locked in a roomtogether for an hour. As they settle down, man A is engrossed in a fascinating book on his favouritesubject. Man B, however, has been forced into the experiment; he is bored and is starring at theclock wondering what he has done to deserve this tedious fate. When they come out of the room,man A, who has been engrossed in his book, will think the hour has flown whereas man B, who wasunoccupied and bored, might consider that he had been in the room for a whole day! What wouldthese perceptions do for the physiology of the two men over a longer period? If man B regularlygets bored and feels time dragging repeatedly over a ten year period then he will truly feel thattwenty five years have elapsed and he will age accordingly.If man A has spent the ten years absorbed with a creative hobby he will feel that the time has passedexceptionally quickly (more like three years) and he will look younger than m an B. Why? It islikely that the subconscious mind which controls all the body's functions reacts to the accumulatedmental input and makes adjustments in the cells of the body accordingly. People who get boredfrequently will feel time drag and therefore age quickly. However, the person continually absorbedin a fascinating activity will feel time flying and stay younger looking because their subconsciousmind will age cells comparatively slowly. The good news is that people involved in activitiesdemanding intuitive and creative skills (such as subjects covered in Prediction magazine) are morelikely to age at a slow rate than those who wander through life with little to occupy their minds - oroccupied with purely logical pursuits.Creative artists, composers and actors seem to go on working into their eighties and looking at leasta decade younger. Martial artists in particular tend to age slowly; I have met masters in China andJapan who look in their forties but are actually octogenarians. They have practised the art of going`outside time' - a state where their will appears to stop time itself - daily over a periods of years. So