Quote of the Day: Pope Paul VI on Aging & Wisdom

We like to pretend time is a neutral ruler: a day is a day, a year is a year, and our feelings are just sentimental noise. But lived experience refuses to cooperate. It stretches, compresses, and plays tricks, until the calendar becomes less a measurement than a mirror. That’s the quiet provocation behind Pope Paul VI’s line: “In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and day's long.”

As a child, novelty does the heavy lifting. A single afternoon can hold a universe, games, discoveries, first-time thrills, so the day vanishes in a satisfying blur. Yet the future feels like an endless runway; adulthood sits on the horizon like a distant continent. Youth doesn’t merely have time; it assumes time. The years feel “long” because the mind can’t yet grasp how quickly repetition turns into acceleration.

Later, the pattern flips. Energy narrows, routines widen, and a quiet day can feel almost architectural, long corridors of hours, a slower gait, fewer interruptions. But the years? They sprint. Holidays stack up like pages riffled by a thumb. Memory compresses what once felt expansive, and the awareness of finitude sharpens the present while making the past blur. The point isn’t nostalgia; it’s wisdom, a call to steward attention before time’s tempo changes again.

Pope Paul VI understood shifting horizons firsthand: guiding the Church through the reforms and turbulence after Vatican II, traveling widely as a pilgrim pope, and insisting that modern life required both conscience and compassion. His pastoral legacy repeatedly returns to the dignity of the person and the urgency of everyday moral choices.

December begins with its annual drumbeat of deadlines and gatherings, an ideal moment to practice mindfulness. Treat today’s hours as something to fill with presence, not just tasks, so that when the years inevitably quicken, you won’t wonder where they went.