Time is a funny thing, when you think about it. In the midst of the passage of time, things seem to move relatively slowly, but observing retrospectively, it’s hard for us to believe that time has gone by so fast. My mother always tells me that time seems to go faster and faster as you get older, and I’m beginning to realize that she’s right. Even though I’m only a sophomore in college, it blows my mind that two years ago I was in high school, even though it feels like only a few days ago. The way that time passes is fascinating and mind-boggling. More than that, it’s astounding how we grow and change over time and how it’s seemingly impossible to notice until we’re looking back on it.
When we’re growing up, time seems to move very slowly. This is likely because we are so excited to grow up, and reach different milestones. Even now, it seems like we are always longing for the weekend, or the next holiday. How many times do we long so dearly for the future that we forget to acknowledge the present? In our society, it seems like we are obsessed with time, always counting the minutes and checking the clock. We are absorbed within the cycle of time, yet in most cases we don’t have full understanding of it. It is very difficult to comprehend the idea of time itself, why sometimes it feels fast and other times slow, and sometimes we don’t even consider it, but rather just fall into the flow of time without questioning it.
At this point in my life, I am somewhat confused by time. I feel as if I am stuck in the middle ground between time passing quickly and slowly. There are instances when time seems endless, for example in the middle of the semester when I’m ready to be done with classes. But then there are other times that time seems to move at the speed of light, such as looking back at the end of the semester and acknowledging how fast it seemed to go. I think that at this point, I’m a bit too young to have an accurate concept of time.
I think that we perceive time differently in different stages of life. The way that a child perceives time is completely different from the way that their grandmother would. I love getting the chance to work with the elderly. I greatly value my conversations with them, mainly in that the way that they perceive the world around them is so different from the way that I do. This is not only because they have experienced more time, but because they have seen time change greatly throughout their lives. For them time is a long novel with many chapters, whereas for someone like me, the book is only beginning.
Time is fascinating, arguably. I think sometimes we choose not to think about it because it is something so vast and hard to understand. But no matter how much we try to fight it, time moves on and changes, and we change along with it. Though it may be difficult to understand time, as we grow and change we start to gain a more significant comprehension of the complex phenomenon that is time.
