Have you ever noticed that time seems to pass exponentially faster? A unit of time that once felt like an eternity now disappears in the blink of an eye. I remember as a six-year old on the first day of first grade Christmas felt like it was years and years away and I couldn’t imagine twelve more years of school. Today, those twelve years of school have been completed for over fifteen years and I start wondering how I’ll finish all of my Christmas projects in time in August.
I believe there is a scientific explanation for this time accelerant phenomenon…or maybe it is more of a mathematical explanation. This is my theory. As we age, we collect memories, experiences and perceptions of the passing seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years and, eventually, decades and scores, then if we’re lucky, a century. As each period of time passes, it becomes less and less significant on its own in terms of quantity as compared to our life as a whole. An instructive way to think of it would be a platform supported by poles. If the platform is supported by just one pole, that pole is fundamentally important because without it, the platform would fall. But if it is supported by one hundred poles, knocking two or three out wouldn’t make any difference; therefore, even though all the poles are working together to support the platform, each one by itself is less significant than it would be with even ninety-nine poles. There may be certain special poles that are dearer to the platform in terms of quality but strictly numerically speaking, they are equal.
Similarly, as we age, each increment of time becomes a progressively smaller percentage of our lives. Let’s take one year for example. For a one-year old child, one year is their entire, or 100%, of their life; one year is 50% of a two-year old’s life; 33 1/3% of a three year old’s life; 20% of a five-year old’s life and so on until at twenty-years old, one year is just 5% of your life and by 50 years old, it is a mere 2% of your life. A person’s sense of time develops over time with the frame of reference being only the time that has passed since the moment they were plucked from their mother’s womb. Because each passing unit of time becomes less and less significant as a percentage of the whole, they seem to pass more quickly as they are compiled.
If you’re five years old and your parents tell you that your birthday is in one year, the only sense of how quickly that time will pass is based on the fact that one year is one-fifth of your entire life to date and with one of five poles holding your platform missing, you can feel the weight and continuing to hold the platform or wait feels much harder. As you move through that year from five years old to six years old, sure each day is becoming less and less a percentage of your entire life but not at a rate swift enough to notice it. It is not until you are twenty or so that the acceleration is readily apparent. Furthermore, at twenty you have the memory of how slow time seemed to past when you were five and the comparison solidifies the sense of time passing faster in your mind. By the time you’re thirty-something like me you are shocked to learn events you thought happened a few months ago actually happened a few years ago and you feel like you’re treading frantically just to keep up with time.
I don’t know about you but my brain hurts from thinking so hard. I’m sure there are ways to articulate it more elegantly and scientifically but that’s my theory about time. You can never get the time back so do what you can with each day before the final figures are in.
