Time

Part of the reason I started posting these essays, if they can be called that, is the growing sense I have that there is a finite amount of time left me. That thought makes me look back at my experience to see what I can see and to think about it.

If you have been reading these you know that one of the questions that has been up for me has been about what difference I have made and the value I have added (or, I suppose, subtracted).

But I have also been aware that I have some thoughts simply about the passage of time itself, and of my subjective experience of it.

In my teens and probably into my early twenties it always felt to me as if time were crawling far more slowly that I wanted it to. The four years of high school felt interminable. The five of college almost as long. Looking back those periods seem to me the smallest of blips. The last twenty-some years I have spent in this new city, a place I would never have imagined ending up by the way, seems to have gone by in a rush.

Thinking of it another way, I remember thinking in the mid to late fifties that what had happened a mere dozen or so years before was ancient history. WW II was something you saw images of on "Victory at Sea," and even though I was born during it (265 days after Dec. 7, 1941--compare that to the normal human gestation period) it felt to me as a youngster like something from another century. Looking back the same amount of time now takes me to a figurative "yesterday" in my subjective experience--the end of the Clinton administration.

I guess it is a little like how a ski slope seems so much steeper looking down from the top than it does when you look up at it. The difference is twice your height, a matter of perspective.

Similarly, I can remember thinking of people much younger than I am now as "old," but people I know of that age now, or even a bit younger I tend to think of as contemporaries, and forget completely that they have no experience of things that are vivid for me, like JFK's election.

What's that line? "Time keeps on slippin', slippin', into the future..."

It is so highly subjective. Fascinating to me.