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Photo: Evgeniy Shvets // Stocksy United
Halloween has always been a big deal in my small family.
My wife is Irish and associates childhood memories with it.
With decorations, parties and children-with-sugar-sugar-feeding, we have made a major contribution to popularizing the Mummenschanz in our community.
That happened pretty quickly, which of course wasn't up to us: Halloween spilled into our lives from the west because it's cool for children and a great reason for young adults to let off steam. For a few years, many people complained that it was "foreign stuff", that they had Saint Martin and Carnival. In the meantime, a generation has grown up that has never known a life without Halloween: Traditions are born so quickly. Some decorate their houses for Halloween more elaborately than at Christmas. The world can change pretty quickly, and sometimes in a way that is really fun to be around.
For me personally, the day has a second meaning.
I started Halloween 1999 at SPIEGEL, then online.
That's how I came up with it.
When I looked at the calendar, I noticed: Man, you've been with the company for 22 years!
22 years of age, that's quite a stretch, even if it doesn't seem like that to me at all.
I came as a relatively young editor, and now I am - Zack: felt suddenly!
- one of the silverbacks.
In retrospect, this time condenses into two or three phases, all of which were challenging in their own way.
Time flies, as the saying goes, and after 22 years you look back and realize: Hey, it basically happened very quickly.
My eighty-year-old mother claims that things are going faster and faster.
The older you get, the faster time flies.
You shout like that, look out the window and yikes!
- it was autumn out there again.
I know what she's talking about.
There have been years in my life that are so full of memories that they seem endless to me.
Summers are so pickepack full of events that it would take longer to recount than the recap of the past ten summers.
But this is exactly where the key to our subjective perception of time lies.
The speed of time depends on what we do with it.
The Covid Years: A foretaste of uneventful times?
There is no year in my life that I can tell as quickly as the year 2020. When the announcement of the lockdowns came, we were with the family in Ireland, we just got out, then the borders literally closed.
It feels like three quarters of my story "That was my 2020" therefore covers the period from January to February.
Because after that, until the end of the year, nothing happened that was worth telling.
In the photo album of my life, a double page would be enough for the first year of Covid.
2021 was different. We became grandparents for the second time. It was a year in which a lot revolved around the children. We took advantage of the easing over the summer to undertake cautious, modest trips. We ate out again, we celebrated in small groups, we reanimated social contacts that had fallen asleep. The 2020 double page would be followed by 36 pages in 2021. Some years just produce more memories than others. In my very personal, subjective perception, this was a relatively long year.
Obviously - at least as long as we are healthy and self-determined - it is largely in our own hands how quickly our time goes by.
It's very simple: monotony, uniformity of everyday life or work life, the lack of experiences or social contacts make our days fly by, fizzle out, disappear.
Nothing gets stuck that could fill the case with memories: Was there something?
Oh, what should be?
Everything as always.
"Passing" is something passive
It is this "everything as always" that empties our lifetime, turns it into a shell that can be crumpled up and thrown away: nothing in it can be forgotten.
But it's not the time that begins to race as we get older.
We just can't get our butts up and stop moving with her: Sure, it then seems like she's running away.
More midlife columns
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Alcohol in old age: »You just fell over.
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"Writer's block": How the deadline kills my creativityA midlife column by Marc Pitzke, US correspondent
If you do not fill life with events, you can hardly feel it anymore, it is like time that you have not experienced.
The joke is that events don't have to "happen" to change that.
We can actively create events ourselves if we overcome our own laziness.
If it feels like time is flying by, we should understand it as a warning signal that drives us to the front door: looking for events, meeting people, experiencing or changing things.
You can even get it largely free of charge.
As a minimum, it is far better to play rummy with four people than to sit in front of the television with two people.
Cooking in a group instead of alone.
And of course, doing more than that produces even more time to remember.
Incidentally, Halloween, which is based on the Celtic Samhain festival, has an interesting history.
Samhain (spoken: Saoh-ien) was one of the four big holidays in the Celtic festival circle and marked the end of the lively summer time, the coming of the barren winter days.
On Samhain night the spheres of life and death touched.
The Celts celebrated this with wild festivals, and this can be understood as a joyful rebellion against the immanent threat of lifeless times.
A good moral from the story, 'I think.
And you?