When "old" people used to tell me that each year sped by more quickly than the previous, could I understand? No way. A year's just a year no matter what a person's age, isn't it? Wrong. Momentum builds with age.

Having experienced this effect rather acutely in recent months, I'm trying to take life at a more relaxed pace, to be more selective in my activities. Surprisingly, I've actually been able to make some changes.

One choice affected this column. After almost seven years of weekly deadlines, I reckoned that cutting back from weekly to monthly might relieve a lot of pressure.

And I also turned down an invitation to teach creative writing at a local college. Tight schedules just create too much stress right now.

But being neither easily defeated nor denied, "conservation of momentum" is persistent in nudging me onward at a rapid pace. Nevertheless, I'm trying to follow Eddie Cantor's advice. "Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast — you also miss the sense of where you are going and why."

And from Robert Frost: "There's absolutely no reason for being rushed along with the rush. Everybody should be free to go very slow.... What you want, what you're hanging around in the world waiting for, is for something to occur to you."

For example, two weeks ago I took my 92-year-old dad to see his longtime friend Lewis Billings in Russellville. And if next week turns out warm and dry, I'll take him on another trip to Walnut Grove Cemetery near Hector so he can amble among the graves and remember. But his pace is one I can accommodate.

Just last Friday, old friends Roger and Nancy Bishop invited us on a trek to Little Rock, where we toured the Arkansas Arts Center, lunched on hamburgers at the River Market—and then enjoyed a jostling trolley ride over the river. A final stop to peruse art exhibits at the Cox Building left us beat but relaxed.

Saturday found us in Benton so Mary and her sister Betty could scour antique shops for bargains.

In Thornton Wilder's famous play "Our Town," Emily, who had died in childbirth, is permitted to go back and relive an ordinary day of her life. She picks her 12th birthday and watches as the events of that day unfold. Shocked at how casually the living interact with each other, she exclaims in her dismay. "Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me."

The skeptic Simon Stimson then interprets what Emily has observed. "Yes, now you know. Now you know! That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To always be at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another. Now you know — that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness."

When momentum attempts to thrust me beyond where I ought to go, life invites me to pause and evaluate.