Faster than the speed of time
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t waste at least a little thinking space over how much time speeds up as we age. The phenomenon has spawned numerous mathematical theories and countless arguments about physiology and environment that keep mathematicians and social scientists eternally butting heads in the halls of academia.
In real life, the passage of time manifests itself as an increasingly kaleidoscopic sense of memory and the feeling that summer gets shorter every year. After all, when you’re six and you only have linear memories from maybe the last three years, an 11-week summer vacation is effectively 7% of your whole life. At 40, 7% is 145 weeks, or almost three years. That’s quite a difference.
For ongoing, in-depth exploration of time acceleration theory, I suggest having a bunch of kids and spreading their ages out over as many years as you can. My sample is rather small for this model: I have five kids aged 10 to 18, with nieces and nephews expanding the data set to the ages of 5 to 21. My research has nothing to do with the kids’ perception of time, but with my own. I can’t keep up with how often these kids are metamorphosing, while my own growth has slowed to a barely evolutionary crawl.
Savannah just reached the delightful age of 14, complete with all the age-appropriate trappings, and Jesse is starting to smell like puberty is not far off. But right now it’s Cassidy who amazes me the most.
When I met Cass she was freshly 14, and the family member everyone was afraid of provoking. Known for her dark bursts of temper, she kept to herself a lot, painting her nails black and staring moodily into space for hours on end. As I was getting to know her siblings, I found some way to bond with each of them, but Cassidy was a pissed-off Cheshire Cat to me. I even lowered myself to her engagement style once or twice, to my great personal mortification.
But in the thick of what I think back on as “the dark times,” Cass started sitting in the kitchen while I cooked, slicing vegetables for sauce and helping out with little comment. At some point she took an interest in learning how to cook and so we found our common ground. She’s always volunteered to grocery-shop with me, I’m sure at least partly to get out of her dad’s “boring” house, and it’s been my good fortune that she’s a natural bargain hunter with a great head for kitchen math and recipe substitutions. Even in the most stressful step-parenting times we were mellow together at the store, and it gave our relationship a place to take root. Eventually our chat progressed from price comparisons to fashion, and from there to boys and friends and peer pressure and school and everything that makes up the life of a teenage girl. We made a pact: what’s shared at the store stays at the store. Now she talks my head off from the minute we shut the car doors, and she’s told me some amazing stuff – nothing dangerous, or I’d have to share with Dad (that’s also clearly stated in our pact). I have earned her trust, and the amazing friendship of a girl who, at 16, is quickly blossoming into an incredible young woman. Physically, emotionally and socially, she is transformed – and all in the same two years where my biggest personal changes have been going up a dress size and discovering comfortable shoes.
In two years I will look basically the same. I will still get up early in the morning and make coffee. I will plant flowers in the spring and cover my roses in the fall. But Cassidy will be a brand new grownup, with her book unwritten and her life stretching out before her. Just like Alex is now. Just like Sav and Jesse and Harry will be in a few years. And I will have gotten to witness it all, flashing by in less than a blink, a Petri dish-perfect demonstration of how time flies. VS
