Life at the Speed of Time

Today is the first day of 2015.

But that can’t be possible; it seems like the first day of 2014 was just yesterday. And the first day of 2013 was only last week. What’s happening here?

Everything that happened between 1 January and 31 December 2014 seems to have whizzed by in a blur. Or even worse, it sometimes feels like it never really happened… like it was just some kind of dream. That’s how the hyperspeed of time seems.

We all notice that each New Year, each birthday, each work anniversary comes faster than the previous. And as time goes on, its velocity seems to increase. It doesn’t seem so long ago that 911 was just an emergency number in the U.S., there was only one former president Bush, and no one had even heard of a leftist charlatan named Obama. It seems like it was just the other day that I visited Ukraine for the first time. And only a short while before that, I was working in Peru. I was in great shape and had hair.

None of those things (or so many more) seem like they were very long ago, but they were. So much time has flashed by in what seems like an instant.

It Wasn’t Always So Quick

When we were children in school, there was nothing slower or more frustrating than time. The clock on the wall simply did not move, especially in math class. But maybe part of that frustration was due to the fact that our school clocks had no second hands; you could not actually see the movement of time.

And summer vacations, even though they were glorious fun, also seemed to pass at a leisurely pace. That’s part of what made them so wonderful. I’m sure that for our parents, however, those summer vacations crawled by at the speed of a sleepy snail… with a handicap.

But as we get older, time speeds up. You would think that our work time would crawl by, and to be honest, sometimes it does. But usually we are so pressed for time to get things done that the available time sprints like a cheetah so that our stress levels will rise. Time is truly insidious.

Of course, nothing makes time scream by faster than the Internet. I think all of us have sat down to spend “just a few minutes” online and then realized that an hour (or three) has passed. And how many of us have missed appointments or changed our plans because the Internet literally ate our time?

More than Perception?

Often I wonder if it is just our perception that time is moving faster or if time really is accelerating. There are some who believe that everything actually IS moving at a faster pace than in years past. The further it goes, the faster it goes until each person has the lifespan of a gnat.

Do you suppose that millions of years ago gnats lived for 80 years?

But whether the laws of physics can support a real increase in the velocity of time or if it just seems to be moving faster to us, it doesn’t really matter. For every person, perception is reality, so if we perceive that it is moving faster – and many of us do – then it is.

The Past: Did it Really Happen?

Sometimes I think of the past, and none of it seems real. School days, Guam, Japan, my days at CSU, and other eras of my life – and the people in them – sometimes seem like nothing more than dreams. I know on one level that the events happened and the people were real, but they seem to have lost the feeling of reality. And often I question whether they really happened or not.

This is one of the worst effects of time’s relentless drive to increase speed. Before we can savor the moment, it is lost to the past. And then the past becomes a fuzzy recollection of faces and events that don’t seem entirely real. It’s like a movie we watched one time, long ago, and can’t completely remember.

This feeling – that the events and people of the past are just some obscure movies – is probably heightened by the fact that these situations and the people in them are each completely separate from each other. At least, this is how it is in my case. I have often moved from one geographic location to another, one cast of characters to another, with no connection from one to the next.

A person who has lived his or her whole life (or most of it) in one place has a continual connection with the place and people. In that case, there is a constant connection of the past to the present, and perhaps this keeps the past rooted in the reality of the present.

But when you've lived your life in a series of completely different situations, with no connection to each other or to the present, they have more of a tendencey to fade into a surreal kind of obscurity. Thinking about them, recalling events and faces, becomes more like just dreaming.

Maybe nothing that we consider "real life" is real at all.

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