Time...

I was sitting here reading, but my mind kept wandering until suddenly I thought, Holy Crap!...the year is almost over already?! How does that happen? One moment we're cruising merrily along and the next we suddenly realize that the time just slipped by.

One thing is for sure as I get older....time really does seem to go quicker the older you get. This is a strange phenomenon and one that I haven't quite figured out yet...and may never figure out. Why is it that as we get older and hopefully wiser...and to the point that life starts making some sense that the days and years start to suddenly zip by?

As a kid, I remember thinking the time between Halloween and Christmas seemed to be an eternity. I used to think it took forever for Christmas to arrive and nowadays I think...how the hell did Christmas get here so quickly....didn't we just celebrate it?

I also remember being in college and thinking that four years in college was gonna take forever. I considered changing my major at one point, but my immature mind overruled the decision thinking that it would add too much time past my initial time investment. At the end of next year, it'll be 20 years since I graduated from college which I find amazing. In retrospect it seems that the time flew by, and I also think of how silly my youthful thoughts of time were back then. Adding a year or more to my college experience would have been a drop in the bucket.

Perhaps retrospect has something to do with this feeling that time goes faster the older you get. When you're a kid, you don't have much history and so you really have nothing to gauge and compare for the passage of time. As you get older and accumulate experiences and personal history then each moment, each day, each year becomes a proverbial drop in the bucket of personal experiences and time.

Thinking back on some of my silly youthful thoughts makes me remember a line from one of Frank Capra's movies where an older character was getting annoyed at the younger characters' inability to sieze the moment and exclaimed...oooo youth is wasted on the young! The older I get the more I understand that statement!

I'm not sure there's a solution to this, but perhaps the best one can do with this realization of time is try and appreciate each and every moment in that moment as best one can...for this and every moment slips away so swiftly.