“When I was little, a day seemed to last forever, especially a school day. Now a day is nothing, just a blink of an eye. You know intellectually that a month is still a month, a week is a week, a day is a day, but it goes so much faster the older we get.

“Sometimes I play a little game with myself. I know it’s odd, but I do it just the same. I try to make time pass like it did when I was a child. First, I shut off the television and listen to the ticking of the clock. That slows everything down. Then I tell my worries to back off so I can concentrate. It works like a charm. The morning lasts a long, long time.”

These are the words of Anna Ornish at age 81, a woman interviewed by my Seattle-based colleague Wendy Lustbader and retold in her newest book, “What’s Worth Knowing.”

By way of commentary on their conversation, Wendy says: “Anna Ornish had never been exposed to Eastern meditation techniques, but when I told her that some of what she was doing had been taught in traditions a few thousand years old, she said, ‘Good. That means I’m not so peculiar.’ ”

Convincing as Anna’s experience of time is, not every older person feels it this way. For some, time drags slowly indeed. Those, especially, who live in situations not to their liking –  – in nursing homes, perhaps, or in their own home cut off from everyone else –  – find that the hours have become glaciers, slow and cold.

But in writing about older people, in speaking about them, you have to generalize. Everyone is unique, personal experience is never repeated exactly, so we must settle for approximations. It so happens that what Anna lives through comes close to what I experience.

For me, time is moving awfully fast. My daughter’s schooling is nearing completion when it seems just to have begun. Those double deadlines for newspapers each week force the days to speed up. Even the dour days of last March did not much slow down my weeks.

What makes Anna interesting is her readiness to experiment. She plays with time, manipulates it so as to adjust its speed to her own liking and for her own purposes. Drawing on the wisdom of long living, she has learned how to arrest time and make it slow down in its passage.

The amazing thing is that she wants it to go more slowly. Few of us are capable of such a bold more; it would terrify us. But she has a purpose for time, says she wants to concentrate. What she means by that remains unclear but it sounds as if she wants to enter into some higher sphere of consciousness. You could call it prayer or contemplation or peace of soul.

Whatever you call it, Anna finds a value in it that counteracts the escape of time, time passing without meaning. It’s a lot better than television. And it certainly beats self-pity and regret. Anna’s reconstituted time is pregnant with new life. It makes her old age, if not sweet, at least resonant with welcome sounds.

Anna thinks of herself as peculiar, though when she discovers herself to have something in common with millennia of spiritual traditions, she feels less so. Being back in the time warp of childhood is not so peculiar if you know what to do with your time. In childhood, many of us suffered the long summers because, once we got beyond the neighborhood games, there was not much else to do.

Anna, standing still in her new time, presumably acts interiorly, doing the work of advanced maturity. She is coming to grips with the givenness of her life, the parts of it that she has never controlled but received from others. She is learning how to appreciate each day for the reality that is packed into it. She makes it her business to unpack its meaning, to investigate all that it brings.

Anna’s way cannot be everyone’s. Listening to the tick of the clock, for instance, would drive me berserk. But for her, it serves as perhaps a hypnotic device to send her into a new sphere of time. It carries her beyond the intellectual framework that tells her about a day being still a day. She has entered a spiritual place where the daily realities have been transformed.

I would like to be as adventurous as Anna. Her spirit draws my admiration. Without knowing much of anything about the traditional techniques of spirituality, she has discovered a precious secret of how to age well. I hope that her experiments with truth, as Gandhi would have called them, continue to bring her time’s surprising gifts.

Richard Griffin