Time flies... or does it?

You know what I realized the other day?  Time seems to go by a lot faster the older you get.  Once upon a time my Papa said to me, "Boy time flies, Robbie.  You wake up one day and you're eighty."  He just happened to be eighty at the time; but when I take a step back from it all, if time is flying by so quickly for me at thirty-three, how must it be when you're eighty?!

This became a bit of an obsession with me.  I started to ponder why when you're a little kid, the school year seems to go on for eons and eons, but it's ok, because so does the summer; but when you're in college, the school year goes by in about ten minutes-- and guess what-- SO DOES THE SUMMER!  Once you're out of college, things just start to seem like blips on a screen.  It's Christmas, then it's the 4th of July, then it's Thanksgiving, then it's Christmas again... blip... blip... blip... and time passes in blips.

Now don't get me wrong; sitting through another eight-hour work day can certainly still seem like an eternity.  Being stuck in bumper-to-bumper, "nobody's going anywhere anytime soon" traffic for a half hour can feel like an entire day was lost.  That's not what I'm saying.  A minute is still a minute, an hour is still an hour, a day is still twenty-four hours.  How does it FEEL differently as you grow older, though?  What makes time such an interminable thing in our youth and such a finite thing as we age?  Don't worry... I figured it out... It's just simple math, actually.  Now stick with me:

When you are four years old, each year of your life represents ONE QUARTER of the time you have spent alive, on the planet, a living and breathing human being.  There is no wonder why a quarter of your entire life (so far, at that point, of course) seems like a MIGHTY, MIGHTY long time.



Now, when you are ten years old, each year of your life represents ONE TENTH of the the time you've been alive.  It doesn't take a genius to realize that this is a much smaller ratio when compared to a year of your life when you're four.  Again, it's no wonder time would seem to be going a little faster-- even at ten!

 

Take the graph above and cut the green part into fifths.  That's how small a year would be in relation to your entire life at fifty.  Now cut it into eighths and imagine how fast that year flew by for my Papa at eighty!  It's no wonder to me, anymore, how relative it all is and how each year of your life as you age is a smaller and smaller ratio to your life as one whole, singular unit of time. 

 

Maximize your time!  Get up early and go to bed early!  As Benjamin Franklin once said: "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise."  Life passes most people by while they're making grand plans for it...