Slowly or Quickly?
January 22, 2010 (Friday)
I’m always amazed when I sit down and just think about the passage of time, and how the same number of years seems like a long time or a short time, depending upon your point of view.
It’s a well-known fact that time passes much more slowly as a child than as an adult, especially a senior adult.
When I wrote about public school supplies yesterday, I was referring to a period of my life from 1937 to 1949. Even now as I look back it seems like a very long twelve years from First Grade to Graduation, but as I contemplate my retirement years from 1996 to 2010, it seems like a very short period of my life.
A small child will become panic-stricken when left with a stranger, as in the church nursery. Why? His sense of time is virtually non-existent. It’s always “now.” He knows, “My mother is not with me now“. No way to explain to the toddler that his mother will return.
As that child grows and is taken into the worship service, he has begun to develop a sense of time’s duration, and that one hour for him seems like a year for you and me. When the child gets restless during worship, the adults need to understand, be sympathetic and try to help.
Now I’ve been retired fourteen years, two years longer than I was in public schools. (I suppose it could be argued that I have never really retired). But even now, at age 78, those 12 years of school seem much, much longer than the 14 years of “retirement” (whatever that is). It’s good to think about such things, because life then remains mysterious, and that’s wonderful at my age.
