Thinking About Kids

I have another reason that time seems to fly when you get older.

As a kid you anticipate the coming event but don't have as good a grasp of time. My children used to plan for Halloween right after New Years. They would plan what they are going to wear, what houses they should visit and how they are going to decorate our windows. Every week or two they would ask how long it is to Halloween. As they got older they still anticipated events and they still seemed so far off.

As we get older we know when the big event is and we think it's still 3 months off, its next month, OH MY GOSHh it's next week. We don't plan and anticipate, we know it is coming and suddenly it is closer than we think. Time flies.

It is similar to riding in a car. When you go someplace for the first time you think you are never going to get there, but it seems so much shorter on your way home because you recognize more and more things the closer you get, and are no longer thinking "it's just around the corner"

Most of Dr. Friedman's work is on exactly how young kids come to understand and mark the passage of time. I'll pass on this thought.

The whole article seemed to be written by one who is not old enough to have experienced the speeding up of time - and does not understand that the effect is real. It is not a folk tale. It is actually pretty scary. I'm not even 60 and I've been experiencing this phenomenon for some years, with it getting worse each year. The theories cited are silly. They don't sound like anything a senior person would suggest.

I suggest that we older people ARE very busy, in our way, and not on the clock, as in working. I suggest that as a person starts doing things more for themselves than for a boss or a child, that they're focus is not on time, and as a result a lot of time can pass before they notice it gone.

I went back to college for a few years. No time has ever moved so quickly for me. But after this period of time, I have had a lot of personal projects to do and it still seems like I barely look up and another day has disappeared. Another week. Another month. Another year. In the case of watching my grandson grow, it is alarming how quickly he's growing up. It may be why grandmas want their grandkids near, in case they miss the whole childhood!

And the time travel experience is especially astounding when we see people who live at a distance and suddenly their hair is white and their bodies have fallen and they're moving more slowly. It was "just yesterday". . . !

Or trying to keep up with the techno-crazes - also "just yesterday" when the latest thing was the 8-track player, the microwave, color tv, electric car doors, surround sound, etc. The problem is that our brains, as seniors, DO recall this stuff very easily, because our brains are still enjoying some of that stuff. All the newest things seem unnecessary. Music was enjoyed on stereos that made our houses reverberate. It was excellent. The newer stuff doesn't even seem as good a lot of times. This computer I'm using is about 10 years old but still functions very well. But 10 years old is ancient to younger people. The past 10 years have been very full and almost went by in a blink. I look for ways to slow it down because the NEXT 10 years may go by even faster!

If the key to slowing time down is working a boring job, I've got to get one of those again. It would be better than the eternal timelessness of sitting in a doctor's waiting room.

Seems to me, a year for a ten year old is only 1/10th of their life where a year to a 50 year old is 1/50th of their life. It's relevent. Time becomes smaller in a sense.