It seems only yesterday that I was getting ready to move into the dorms, excited to begin my college life. Today, I registered for my classes for the spring of 2009. Where has the semester gone? Very few people will disagree with me that time seems to fly by much faster than it did a few years ago. Days that blur into weeks blur into months blur into years, and before you know it, four years have flown by you.
There are never enough hours in the day to do everything: to take a nap, to finish tons of work before 1 a.m., to read a good book. Where is it all going? Nowhere, of course. According to some, it’s all about perception.
There are several ideas on how we perceive time, and why it is that time seems to move faster. The first is proportional time, which states that we perceive time as a proportion of our lives. For instance, a year in a child’s life is a much greater percentage than a year in an elderly life. So essentially, the older we get, the greater the sense that we are running out of time, and hence the feeling that everything is going way too fast.
Another concept, complex time, states that as we get older, we have much more to do than as children, hence the feeling that there is not enough time to accomplish all our tasks. However, this does not explain the experiences of those of us who have a lot of time on our hands and still feel like our five-hour nap went by much too quickly.
Finally, routine time states that as we get older, we cultivate a set of established practices which develop into a routine. The repetitiveness of the same mechanical tasks provides little stimulation for the brain; if instead we did something new every day, time would not seem to go as fast. This is also a faulty argument, because the fact that I have to attend some not-so-fun classes everyday does not make them go any faster!
One can agree or argue with all these postulations, but the fact of the matter is that, while we ponder on this phenomenon, the hours still turn into days into weeks into months.
So, maybe time seems to pass quickly because our life is slowly ebbing away, or maybe it’s because we’re all procrastinators, and we feel pressured because we leave all our work to the last minute. Or maybe we are too set in our daily routines. Maybe it’s a combination of all of the above, and maybe it’s none.
When you really think about it all, it hardly matters, because while we ponder and hypothesize, the hours still blur into days blur into weeks blur into months. The most important thing is maybe not so much to try to slow down time, but rather to take advantage of whatever time we have. Instead of complaining, maybe we should seize the moment that is now, and live to our fullest, every hour, every day.
What time is it?
Published: Monday, November 24, 2008
Updated: Monday, November 24, 2008
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