When did you stop chasing fireflies?

I’ve spent a lot of time sitting in people’s backyards, near a dying bonfire, watching fireflies blink on and off in the distance. It wasn’t always this way — I used to see them every single night in the summer, run after them and catch them. I noticed the change the summer after I graduated. Now, I only see fireflies during an afterparty or a barbecue or something, when I start to feel like I’ve been there too long and I’m starting to wish I had brought bug spray; I find myself turning to the dim tree line as an escape from the humidity and overlapping voices of the people around me, searching for comfort in the distant flickering.

The far-off trees always turn the same grayish-blue, broken up by those brief little flashes of light. Someone might offer up the idea of trying to catch them. I haven’t caught one in years. I don’t remember how we did it so successfully as kids, night after night, catching firefly after firefly, watching them blink around inside a jar on my dresser until I fell asleep. Now, as I watch them blink on, blink off, I can’t seem to get close enough. I stand where, just a moment ago, one lit up a pocket of the damp air, but somehow when it lights again, it’s moved even further away. 

No one catches fireflies anymore. I find it remarkable how easily they give up; everyone returns to their chairs by the fire after only a few minutes, leaving me in the grass, neck craned up towards the sky, wishing that just one little bug would drift down to meet me. 

I grew up on a farm in southeastern Michigan. We had a big grassy yard and acres of property comprised of fenced-in pastures, fields of flowers and rocks and winding paths shaded by trees. It was a perfect place to grow up. I had more nature at my fingertips than I ever knew what to do with. 

In the winter, I dug snow caves in the ditches bordering our driveway and built 5-foot-tall snowmen with my dad. In the spring, I picked cornflowers and buttercups and threw fuzz from tall brown cattails into the wind. In the fall, I walked paths encased overhead with brilliant oranges and reds and plucked crab apples from the trees in our furthest fields. It was idyllic. 

In the summer, my sister and I would run outside to find dozens of fireflies floating on the tops of meadows, scattered across where the Earth met the starry sky, calling us to come catch them. I would scoop the bugs off of blades of grass, pull them from the cool air or just watch them flicker and shine all around me. I had all the time in the world to admire those twinkling lights. My mom or my dad sat on our back steps in the warm glow of the doorway with a big glass jar, waiting for us as we ran back and forth into the quiet night with more and more in our tiny, innocent hands. I don’t remember when, or why, we ever stopped.

That part of my life feels like a completely different world than the one I live in now — and in a way, it actually is. Fireflies are disappearing, which honestly hits me like a truck. There really is no going back.

We moved off the farm and into town when I was 11, and since then, the years have gone by in a blur. When I was young, I remember reading that as you age, each year of your life feels shorter than the one before. The theory is that as you get older, a year becomes a smaller fraction of your life. For example, one year at age 5 is 20% of your life, while one year at age 40 is only 2.5% of your life. Therefore, you perceive each new year as more brief than the last, despite the same amount of time passing — it’s an exponential decrease in the amount of time you have left.

Every time someone mentions how quickly time flies, I think of that theory. It’s been stuck in my head ever since I first read about it. It just makes so much sense, which is simultaneously satisfying and devastating. Every single second, every passing moment of my life, is shorter than the last. We think that we have time to do more, to be more, but the years ahead of us are shortening into hours, minutes, seconds — our perception constantly accelerating under a construct that we are helpless to stop. 

It makes me want to panic. I feel like I should become more and more productive to compensate for the forever quickening passage of time. And being on the University of Michigan’s campus, surrounded by people who are becoming engineers or doctors or star athletes, studying in the footsteps of successful alumni, does not lessen this pressure. I think that many students, especially at high-caliber universities like this one, feel the same way.

At the beginning of the summer, I made a list of things I wanted to do before coming back to school. I wanted to get back into running, draw more, write essays, read, work, learn piano — make myself into someone worthy. Aside from trying to measure up to the amazing people I met during my first year at the University, writing out my goals for the summer was my attempt to cope with the seemingly endless number of weeks that stood before me.

I hugged my friends goodbye at the end of April and sobbed in the halls of West Quad for hours, which felt like minutes, marveling at how daunting the next four months felt. Now, with the new semester in full swing, I feel like summer has slipped right through my fingers. Time’s ever-increasing speed still manages to surprise me.

Time doesn’t just seem faster because of the proportion theory. A more modern theory suggests that we might feel this way because we don’t pay attention to our lives anymore. When we’re growing up, exciting things are happening constantly, like starting new schools, having our first kiss and graduating. Especially when little kids, everything is new and thrilling. But as we get older, we fall victim to routine. The things we usually love become empty; repetition desensitizes us to everyday beauty. It’s easy to not notice how much the fireflies we cup in our hands are worth, and by the time we do realize, there are no more chances to go back and catch them.

From this moment on, I’m going to choose to pay attention. I am going to fill myself with so much gratitude that I tear up just thinking about how lucky I have been. In doing so, I believe that time will slow down. I’m not going to find more years by searching through the childhood behind me or the career ahead of me. I’m going to find them by sitting around with the friends I’ve found here, laughing on their porch late at night and reveling in all of the stupid things we get to do together. Time is tucked into my salad at lunch and folded into my favorite clothes sitting in my closet. If you make a conscious effort to be excited by even the simplest joys in your life, you start to control time rather than letting time control you. 

I’m not upset about how my summer has gone. While I didn’t touch a piano, finish an impressive amount of books or publish any of my work, I did do a lot of laughing. I took time to linger in doorways where I could chat with my little brother and sat in parks with my eyes glued to pink sunsets. I bookmarked beautiful moments in my mind, not just knowing, but appreciating how fleeting they were. And at the same time, I read a bit, worked a lot and did go on a few good runs. It wasn’t what I had planned, but it was enough to make myself proud.

Some weeks ago, I woke up early and walked downtown with my mom to watch a parade. I used to hate moments like that — walking with my mother to go see an arguably crappy parade — but this summer, I loved the simple joy of it all. I’ve grown a new appreciation for it. My heart feels more open to home, to my mother, to my flawed little town. There used to be a bitterness in my chest, like I wasn’t truly home and never would be again, and I let it infect everything. I didn’t cherish the things I should have because I didn’t see the value in them. I just wanted to go back: to the farm, to the grass, to the fireflies and especially to the feeling that I have plenty of time to waste. 

I’ve learned to love the reality that time will pass no matter what I do, and I can’t return to all of those years that I have spent so much time missing. They were beautiful, but they’re gone. Still, accepting this fact delivered me to a present full of standards and expectations I’m not familiar or comfortable with yet. There’s a tricky balance between slowing down and moving forward. I tend to forget that I can lean too far either way. Now, I’m trying to learn how to have both. Standing in a meadow from my childhood won’t make the years slow back down, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have time to kill. I’ll make the effort to feel time pass through me as I hold my life in my hands, knowing that, despite the pressure of this school and of this world, I don’t need to be and do everything right now; knowing I have all of these beautiful seconds to live through and I can make them whatever I want.

Statement Columnist Audrey Hollenbaugh can be reached at aehollen@umich.edu.

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