ELIZABETH'S REALLY RELATIVE TIME

Suzanne’s blog got me to thinking about time in its least precise, most personal sense. That is, how we as people experience time rather than how an atom does.

What follows is Elizabeth’s unscientific theory of time:

I don’t know about you, but my first accessible memories come from the time when I was about three years old. I looked out the window at night into a black and silver world of freshly fallen snow. Another memory from the following winter is jumping from one of my father’s footprints to the next as he broke trail, walking us to the school bus. Then we left Milwaukee and moved to southern California.

At age four, I had a year of accessible memories behind me. Put another way, my experience of a year’s duration was 100% of my conscious life. A week was a very long time for me. A month was a huge block of time.

Christmas took forever to come again. Quite literally, it took my entire conscious lifetime—from age three to age four.

Age four to five was a little easier. Now Christmas was only half of my conscious lifetime away. Five to six, easier still, but still a loooooong time coming according to my own personal clock. Waiting was somewhat easier at 13 and a lot easier at 23.

By the time I was 33, the space from Christmas to Christmas dwindled to 1/30th of my conscious lifetime. At 53, it was only 1/50th of my conscious lifetime. Christmas comes along so fast now that I barely have time to put the ornaments away before the holidays are breathing down my neck again.

Time isn’t the same to a 3 year-old as it is to a 13 thirteen-year-old, or to someone 23, 33, or 93. The longer you’ve been alive, the shorter each day is, personally speaking. (Atoms continue to shimmer apart at the same rate no matter what human brains do.)

For me time now is stuck permanently on fast forward.

Do you experience time differently now than you did 10, 20, 30, 40, (gasp) 50, 60 years ago?

And would someone please explain how the hell I got transferred into my grandmother’s body?