by David Gerhart

Created on: September 09, 2009

Psychological Half Life

The term 'half life' as a technical expression is well established in the fields of physics and pharmacology. Defined simply, half life is the time it takes to get halfway through something. When it comes to the decay of radioactive material or metabolism of a chemical compound in the body, we leave the details to the experts in those fields. A third definition for half life expresses something more personal. This definition is considered informal: a brief period during which something flourishes before dying out (

http://dictionary.reference.com/). Understanding this helped me gain an increased level of self awareness.

Last week I had the chance to spend about 9 hours with my family in our minivan driving home from our annual summer vacation. While it was great to get away, everyone had that worn out, over-cooked feeling of week spent outdoors and being very physically active. To help us get from our home to our vacation rental property and back, I used my favorite tech toy: a Garmin Nuvi GPS. I like it enough to use it on my daily commute and places to which I know the directions. I guess I'm hooked on it. If you've ever used one of these for a long trip, you can get hear pretty interesting instructions. For instance, when driving on a road that you will take for a long continuous stretch, the electronic navigator will indicate, continue 100 miles. Hearing such a phrase makes you feel like you will be on that road forever.

Now here's where the 'half life' concept dawned on me and it brings me to the informal definition. While driving, it occurred to me how I have been repeatedly told, and I am beginning to experience, that as one gets older time seems to accelerate. We hear it time and again from friends and relatives. Why is it that as we do get older, time seems to be accelerating? Here is where my road trip analogy comes into play. It occurred to me during our initial 96 mile leg of the trip. I observed that the time to get halfway through the distance, 48 miles, was a long stretch. The next halfway mark, 24 miles, wasn't so bad. As you work this down to 12, 6 and 3 miles, the times halved according with the last 5 miles going by in a flash. Is it possible that aging, as with the traveling, is playing out the same process? As we get closer to our endpoints in life, the remaining miles, or years, do seem to go faster and faster. While we can choose to drive in the fast lane and get places even faster, life has a way of slowing us down physically while at the same time speeding everything up. We can't do the things we did at 20 when we turn 40. I can attest to this being in my early 40's. When we get to 80, I can only guess at our abilities relative to a 40 year old. I'm sure for most, our level of activity will be much less. Nevertheless, the pace of everything going on around us will quicken.

Each of us has a finite time in which to flourish. We decide, consciously or not, how to make the most of that time. Perhaps wisdom and understanding help to balance out the process. Those qualities stay with us and grow even when everything else starts to diminish and we reach the final part of our journey.

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