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megastir
Mega means big or large
stir because I like to mix it up
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Thursday, April 14, 2005 :::
 1 year = 365 days.
This simple picture, however, doesn't square with our perceptions as we age. By our middle years, at least, most of us have become aware that something is amiss, that a very slow but profound change has been sneaking up on us: the years that formerly crawled are now racing by. Where are the long, leisurely summers we knew as children? If it seemed forever to get through the fifth grade, what happened to last year? Why do we now seem so rushed by life? Where are all the things we wanted to accomplish, but never seemed to find the time for?
There is another clue that our lives are not running in a linear, clocklike fashion: when we try to remember back to the earliest years of our childhood, they seem incredibly distant, like a far horizon that always recedes as we attempt to approach it. Why should we find it so much harder to remember the first few years of life than to remember later years, even after a longer time? And why do parents see their children growing up so much faster than they did?
The human mind judges the length of a long period of time, such as a year, by comparing it with current age. For example, a year adds 10% to the life of a ten-year-old, but only 5% to that of a twenty-year-old. For the twenty-year-old, two years are required to add 10%.
It is this percentage that we perceive, not the years themselves.
To the twenty-year-old, two years will seem to pass as quickly as one year will seem to the ten-year-old. Similarly, three years to a thirty-year-old and four years to a forty-year-old, etc., will seem to pass equally fast.
When we are young, the changing nature of our lives tends to obscure the shrinking years: the twenty-year-old rarely thinks about how life was at age 10; life at 20 is filled with different activities and concerns, and it is the future that dominates reverie.
It is only after life becomes more settled and routine that we become more retrospective, and only then do we have an easier basis for comparing the years. However, we tend to adjust to our changing time scale, and our declining physical abilities tends to conceal the nature of the underlying change: since we see ourselves as "slowing down", we accept that life around us seems to go faster.
So if you've read this far you've wasted some precious time.
Better get out there because before you know it...
Times up!
::: posted by Mega at 5:16 AM
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