A Year Needs Landmarks

When I was a child, a summer seemed to contain several different lives.

There was the first week after school, a visit somewhere, a new game, a relative arriving, a day that went unexpectedly wrong, another day I remembered for years. Looking back, the summer had landmarks.

Adult months can be much smoother.

This is different from saying that time literally moves faster or that routine is simply bad. Routine is useful. Much of a stable life depends on repetition.

The problem appears later, in memory.

We do not remember duration the way a clock records it. We remember events, transitions, surprises, beginnings, endings, places, conversations. Henri Bergson distinguished measurable clock time from lived duration. I find the distinction useful because two months of equal length can occupy completely different amounts of memory.

A week in an unfamiliar city may leave dozens of markers. Six ordinary weeks can collapse into a sentence: I was working a lot then.

This makes me think that the frightening part of aging is not only that fewer years remain. It is that years can become harder to distinguish from one another.

I do not want to solve this by turning life into a collection of artificial experiences. Novelty can become another form of consumption: new restaurant, new trip, new activity, quickly replaced by the next one.

What I want instead is enough variation for memory to have edges.

A project with a beginning and an end. A recurring walk that changes with the seasons. A dinner I actually pay attention to. Learning something difficult enough that I can remember not knowing it.

Perhaps this is why rituals matter too. A birthday, an annual trip, a particular meal, even a photograph taken in the same place each year gives time a visible structure.

We cannot make a year longer.

But we can give it shape.

A life without landmarks may still be full. It is simply harder to see where it went.