The Great Patio Intervention and the Speed of Life

 

My partner looked at me over her coffee mug last Saturday and said, “We need to get the patio cushions to the basement and the pots into the garage this weekend.”

I just stared at her. Winterize? It seemed ridiculously early. The sun was shining. There were still a few leaves on the trees. So, I stared some more. She stared back.

(Don’t worry. This isn't a blog about a staring contest. But I was winning.)

Finally, I broke the silence. “But I haven’t even brought up the deck rug yet. Or that owl decoration for the table. And the Thermacell is charged. We could actually sit out there tonight without getting bitten by a mosquito.”

She kept staring at me, not in a "have you finally lost your mind?" kind of way, but with a loving, knowing look. It was the same look she gives me when I can't find my keys or when I insist on checking all the locks on the doors a hundred times. She has a way of letting me know I am loved, but also that maybe I am losing a battle with the obvious.

And then a depressing thought hit me: I could barely remember us using the patio all year. Did we even sit out there once?  Surely, we must have.  But when?

I was busy mentally listing everything we never used out here when she beat me to the punch.

“Because it’s November,” she said.

“But we never even used it!” I protested, knowing that I was being oddly defensive about our neglected outdoor space. “The citronella candle is still in the box!”

She took a sip of coffee. “Do you want to go get it now, then? Do you want to bring up the carpet, the owl, and the light for the corner of the deck?”

She asked this as if the answer was so obvious it would snap me back to reality. So I stared at her again.  She stared back.

And then I did what I had to do. I ran the numbers. We have a fire table, but it’s out of propane. Still, I have my old ski pants, an L.L. Bean jacket, and hand warmers. So, yeah, I can bundle up, enjoy a cup of coffee, and feel totally in my element.

And then I remembered I'm the one who puts on a sweater in July if the air conditioning is too high and considers 70 degrees "chilly." My idea of "braving the elements" is going out to get the mail without a jacket.

Right. She's right.

“No,” I conceded. “I guess not. I’ll bring the stuff down.”

So, I began the big haul. With every trip to the basement, I realized I was storing away another "maybe tomorrow." Where did the summer even go? Was there a summer? It felt like I'd blinked in May and opened my eyes to November.

It got me thinking about how fast time slips away. It feels like I was just cleaning these chairs in the spring, and now I'm putting them into hibernation.

This feeling that life accelerates as we age is something almost everyone feels. It reminded me of something Michelle Obama shared about her mother, Marian Robinson, in her final days. Her mother said, "It went so fast." When Michelle asked what, she simply replied, "Life."

She was right. It does.

This isn't just a feeling; there's scientific evidence supporting it. You might have heard of "proportional theory," which proposes that as you age, each year makes up a smaller part of your life. For a 10-year-old, one year is 10% of their life. For a 60-year-old, it's only 1.6%. That makes sense on paper, but psychologists say what really matters is what our brains decide to hold onto.

Think about it: Childhood and young adulthood are full of firsts, like the first bike, first day of school, and first love. These new experiences help our brains create rich, detailed memories. As adults, we tend to fall into routines, such as bringing all the patio cushions to the basement even though summer clearly hasn't arrived yet (!). Since our brains don't need to record every detail of a typical Tuesday, those months and years can blend into one dull period. When we look back, childhood days filled with unique memories seem long and full, while the routine adult years appear to pass quickly. 

  

So, there I was, carrying the last pot into the garage, having a full-blown midlife crisis right there on my empty patio. And that’s when I realized that my summer didn’t really vanish; it just got lost in the pile of work and to-do lists. Every trip to the basement felt like a tally of all the times we said, "We should sit outside," and then didn't.

I guess the lesson is that while I can't slow down time, I should make a point to use the patio next year. If life is going to pass by this quickly, I want it to be a blur of good moments, not just a pile of unused patio cushions.

Although I guess if I get really desperate this winter, I could always go down to the basement and sit on them. I might even light that citronella candle for some atmosphere. My partner would just walk in, give me that same long, loving look, and probably head back upstairs without saying a word.

Both Sides Now

I have been a professor of social psychology at Miami University (in Ohio) for nearly 31 years.  It’s no stretch to say that I love being a professor and believe I chose the right professional path.  I love being a psychologist, which equips me with the knowledge and tools to help me understand human social behavior.  In effect, my job allows me to ask questions about human social behavior, and then design studies to answer those questions. 

About four years ago, I applied to chair my department. Serving in administration had NEVER been a goal of mine. I was happy to be “just a faculty member,” where I could effectively set my agenda and serve my students and the university. I imagined that as an administrator, I would serve someone else’s agenda; up to that point, I wasn’t willing to do that. But I had been in rank at that point for 27 years and felt that I had achieved all of the significant milestones in my career, and now it was time to give back in a bigger and more impactful way.

Being a department chair is an interesting position, largely regarded as the hardest job in the university.  After serving for four years, I can see why!  As a department chair, you are both a faculty member and an administrator, but you are also neither of those. You simultaneously advocate for faculty (to administrators and to students) and for administrators (to faculty). It puts you in the position of sitting squarely on the fence between faculty and administration, who, just by being categorized as two groups, have animosity toward one another. Faculty often distrust administrators, feeling that they do not understand all of the work that they do.  Administrators sometimes feel that faculty members have more independence than they should. Of course, not every faculty-administrator relationship is fraught—but when tensions arise, it’s often because each group sees the other’s role through their own struggles.

 

But sitting on that fence also has a unique advantage – you can see both sides.  You interact with faculty in ways you likely never did as just a colleague, and you get to directly experience an administrator's perspective, who have demands on them that you likely never realized as a faculty member. This dual perspective forced me to confront a psychological blind spot we all share: the tendency to judge others’ actions more harshly than our own—what psychologists call the actor observer bias. The actor-observer bias describes how we attribute our own actions to situational factors but others' actions to their personality, which makes sense – we have available to us much more information about ourselves (our motivations, our desires, our biological needs, etc.) than we do about anyone else. For example, if you snap at a co-worker, you might blame the stress you are feeling, but if the co-worker snaps at you, you might assume they are mean. But if we just stop for a minute and try to take on the other person's perspective and put ourselves in their shoes, then we might be less inclined to fall prey to the actor-observer bias. We might be less likely to attribute the cause of their (unwanted) behavior to their personality than to the fact that they might be having a bad day or that something is going on in their lives that we know nothing about. And this leads to me think about yet another cognitive bias in our judgements about others – the fundamental attribution error (FAE).  This bias refers to our tendency to overemphasize personality traits and underestimate situational influences when judging others. In short, it seems that when trying to understand someone else’s behavior, we automatically assume that the cause is due to something about their personality and not something possibly uncontrollable in their lives.

Being a department chair for the last four years has come with its challenges, but I will be most grateful for it putting me in the position of seeing both sides now, where I had a bird’s eye view of both faculty and administration because I was that bird. I lived in both worlds and had a front-row seat to both perspectives.  It’s almost cliché to suggest this, but I will anyway – what a better world we might live in if we all took a little time to see both sides now. Suppose we stopped in our tracks and expended a little cognitive energy to consider the situation from the other person's perspective. Next time you’re quick to judge a colleague—or even a stranger—pause and ask: What might I be missing? After all, seeing both sides isn’t just for department chairs.

Both Sides Now

Reflections on Grief

 

So today marks the 4^th anniversary of my Mother’s death.  She died in 2021 of COVID.  She was only 81 years old.  Because of COVID, I hadn’t seen her since December of 2019.  She was hospitalized in March of 2021 (and died in April).  It was a harrowing 5 weeks.  She lived in Delaware, as does the rest of my family.  I live in southwest Ohio.  Not that any of that mattered – hospitals still were not allowing visitors. I called the nurses' station twice a day, every day, for updates on how she was doing, and then texted these updates to family.  She was doing poorly, then she was improving, then her oxygen levels started to drop again, then she was failing…Then I got the call from the doctor on the morning of April 11 – she wasn’t going to make it.  My wife and I packed the car and drove as fast as possible to Delaware – a 550-mile trip.  At that moment, the hospital was allowing one family member to visit at a time. Somehow, they let more than one of us in at a time, but they were not happy about it. 

I got to spend her last 30 hours on earth with her.  When she was awake, she was lucid and aware.  She knew she was going to leave us.  She didn’t want to go.  She told us she was not afraid of dying, but she was afraid of not being with her four children (all of us in our 50s and 60s by that point).  You see, she lived for her children.  We were her life.  We were her identity. She was so concerned that we were all going to be okay.  That is what she wanted to discuss – were we going to be okay? 

My sister and I stayed with her the entire time.  She drew her last breath at 2:45 am on April 14, 2021.  And my life changed forever.  I had already lost my Dad when I was 25 years old, but loss is a strong word.  He was never really there, and at the time, his death meant little to me, save for thinking what a lonely, sad life he lived. His life and death mean more to me now, now that I do not have any living parents.  When my mother died, so much of me went with her.  Social psychologists call this collective memory (Wegner, 1987)– the shared memories and recollections you hold with people close to you, like your family.  When one or more of those people leave or die, it feels like losing part of your mind. When she died, she took with her all of the experiences I had as a baby, a kid, or even an adult that I could not remember. I cannot recall the number of times I would call her and ask things like, “when did I have the chicken pox?”; “what was the name of the neighbor down the street that I ran track with?”; “how old was I when I started my period?”.  And so on.  Now she was gone, and that part of our collective experiences and memories, from her perspective, was also gone. I felt so alone in the world.  I felt like an orphan.

It’s been four years since she took her last breath.  In that time, life, for me and my siblings, has gone on.  We have all had many life experiences in those four years, and she has missed all of them. Sometimes, it feels like those life experiences do not matter because they do not contribute to her collective memory.

In some odd way, I am glad her loss still hurts so much – it reminds me how much I loved her, and how much she loved me. And the one person who could help me manage my grief is not here anymore. 

References:

Wegner, D. M. (1987). Transactive memory: A contemporary analysis of the group mind. In B. Mullen & G. R. Goethals (Eds.), Theories of group behavior (pp. 185–208). Springer-Verlag.