We yearn for things that make life move more slowly. We may not be physically present in later years, but we can live on through others whom we touch. Even when things are most boring, most thankless, and most distressing, most would not trade life for the alternative. Woody Allen commented that his life could be summed up by the joke about the two elderly ladies at a seniors vacation resort. One complained about the meals, noting that the meat was like leather, the potatoes dry as cardboard, and the desserts tasteless.
Life can be like that.
It may sometimes seem difficult and painful, especially as we get older, but it goes all too quickly. The Eternal Braid Saint Augustine said he knew what time was until someone asked him to describe it. Even when patients are intellectually aware of the accuracy of Newtonian time on their digital watches, they also know that time feels of different duration, depending on their emotions, their sense of well-being or ill health, and their sense of danger or relief. In the preliterate period, time was related to natural events and was more cyclical in form, corresponding to the tides, the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the passing and return of seasons. Patients begin to see time cyclically when the future is seen to be finite.