What is your biggest fear? You know, that something that is constantly whizzing around in the back of your head, awaiting to burst and flood your entire mind and body with terror, anxiety, panic—you get the sweats, your hands start to shake, you simply cannot stop thinking about it. Among my greatest fears are Big Foot and aliens, things you might classify as "the unknown", but what tops those for me, is the idea of time.
What is a long time for you? How long is an hour? How slow does the week go by? The year? Prom was THREE years ago? Did it fly by or does it seem like a century ago? Two minutes have gone by since you clicked on this article; feel like thirty seconds? How can ten seconds go by so fast when you're trying to think of something, but go by so slow when you're trying to hold a plank and your arms are shaking? It seems like you've been waiting for your food for hours at Olive Garden, but really it's only been about eight minutes.
Time is weird.
Ever since I was little, it baffled me that time is such a precisely-kept exact measure, but there is absolutely no standard or measure for how it feels. A minute can feel like an hour, your morning can feel like one entire day, and afternoon feel like an entirely new one. A couple hour coffee date can feel like it only lasted a matter of minutes if you're having a good time.
I remember so clearly waiting to leave for a friend's birthday party that was at 3 o'clock in the afternoon one saturday when I was in elementary school. I was so excited and wanted to leave, so I asked my mom how much longer we had until we could go. She told me "about an hour". At this point, I knew how to tell time, and I knew what an hour was...but what I didn't know was how long an hour was, how long an hour felt. So I asked my mom if an hour was a long time, and she told me, "it depends". Excuse me, on what? Mama Bear explained that if you were comparing it to a whole day of 24 hours, it wasn't too long, but if you were waiting for someone who was an hour late, it was a pretty long time. I didn't really understand.
How could one thing be so many, so different things? So, I waited quietly for as long as I could and then asked again how much longer until we can leave, and I was told fifteen minutes. But how long is fifteen minutes? I didn't get it. My mom said it wasn't long at all, but somehow these fifteen minutes lasted ten times as long as the previous thirty! It made no sense to me. I couldn't grasp it, the way time passes. The whole ride to the party I had my little brows furrowed, deep in thought about what time actually was. This was the moment I became fascinated with, and developed the inklings of fear, of time. Time was so foreign and strange, yet everybody relied on it so heavily. Everyone in the WORLD. The fact that it was so unknown scared me, and still does today, more and more.
A common "fact" about the way time passes is that "time flies when you're having fun!" That's why when you're on vacation, the week goes by so fast, and you get so sad when it's time to head home, back to the real world. So soon?!
When you're feeling oh so bored, the time will go by, well, oh so slow. At work, when business is down and nothing's going on, you check the clock after you've clocked in at five. Surely it's at least 6:30 by now...but it's only 5:20? Only twenty minutes have gone by? HOW?
Why does time seem to slip away when we're enjoying ourselves? Life would be so much more fulfilling if time allowed itself to slow down in these blissful moments, let us enjoy ourselves for as long as possible- without wasting more time than we actually have. Then in the moments where the second hand seems to stop- when you can't bare to be in this class any longer, you're waiting in a mile-long line for those concert tickets, or you can't escape your thoughts at night while waiting to fall asleep- why won't time speed itself up for us? Try to help us get by with as little stress, boredom, uneasiness as possible?
It doesn't make sense.
As you're living through a week, it seems to be dragging, but on Friday, you look back and think, "woah, Friday already?' Or high school; going through freshman, sophomore, junior, and finally senior year, living through classes day by day, high school seems like a lifetime all in its own. Until the last day of senior year, when you're walking out the doors. When you're walking across the stage at your high school graduation, it's inevitable: your thoughts are, "where did the time go..."
Throughout life, I've found myself thinking more and more consistently about how fast time is going; how short life is. The phrase "YOLO" is so true, it hurts. Why is it that as you get older, time goes by faster and faster? The years feel like months.
Thinking about the current year, 2016...let that sink in. I was watching a movie from 2002 the other day when my mom asked me if the movie was old. I replied, "no, I don't think so, just a couple years old," but then I did think about it. 2002 means that movie was fourteen years old. 2002 sounds like it was MAYBE five years ago. How is it already sixteen years into the twenty-first century? I feel like I'm 18 years old still, but when I'm asked my age, I hesitate for a few moments too long before answering with 21. I turn 22 this year, and I feel as though I just graduated high school.
No matter what, we all rely on time to keep our lives organized and check, even if we are the most unorganized, untimely people. Time runs our lives, but still, I cannot grasp how it works. The way it runs, the way it feels; it's so different for all of us, and varies so much for each of us individually, depending on the day, the year, what we're doing. There is nothing that is constant besides how fast the second hand, the minute hand, and the hour moves on a clock, yet life without time would not work. We all have different amounts of time. Some people live to be 100, while some lives are cut short at youthful childhood ages. The scary thing is that maybe the twelve year old that committed suicide, maybe their life felt like 100 years long, while the man who lived to be 102 felt as though he didn't live long enough, maybe his lifetime in his eyes, was a mere twenty years of living.
The fact is, there's no way to measure perception of time. It is a complete unknown, and it's that uncertainty about what has happened, and what is bound to happen that scares me. Time is inevitable, it is running out, and there is no way around it.
