The new year brought me an unexpected gift: time.
Not the sweeping, life-altering kind. Just a little more margin in my days. Enough to notice how often I’ve been moving through life on autopilot and how quietly time slips by when you do.
When I was younger, people in middle age loved to say things like, “It goes by so fast.” Back then, those words bounced right off me. I was too busy in the thick of it to imagine how quickly years could blur together.
Now, looking back on the past 20 years, I get it.
Time didn’t just pass. It compressed.
And I’ve started to wonder if one reason decades feel like they fly by isn’t age at all, but routine. We settle into our work, our roles, our rhythms. Days become efficient. Predictable. Familiar. Autopilot makes life run smoothly, but it also makes it quieter. Less textured. Easier to rush through without noticing.
This little bit of extra time has felt like an invitation to interrupt that pattern.
So instead of filling it with better habits or bigger goals, I decided on something simpler. I want to try new things.
Not in a dramatic, reinvent-my-life way. No grand declarations. Just small disruptions to the familiar. Trying a new system. Learning something I know nothing about. Cooking something I’ve never made. Starting a project without worrying if I’ll be good at it. Saying yes to curiosity instead of defaulting to what’s comfortable.
I want the next few decades to feel felt. I want days that stretch a little because they’re interesting, not because they’re packed. I want to stay open to ideas, to people, to versions of myself that haven’t fully formed yet.
Maybe time feels like it speeds up when we stop interrupting it.
So this year, I’m practicing interruption. Stepping off autopilot when I notice it humming along too smoothly. Letting curiosity lead, even when it doesn’t lead anywhere useful [insert lame Valentine’s Day mantle photo here].