Perception and time … It’ll be Christmas before you know it

This one constant is irrefutable: Time is linear. That’s true for everyone. Unless you believe Einstein’s theories enveloping future time travel. Applying his theories of relativity, he was able to show that an object (maybe a human in space) moving at the speed of light is able to travel into the future. Still linear, but pretty cool. This theory also disproves any possibility of traveling back in time. Can’t happen. Only in our heads. Dang.  
So, there’s that. But time is also perception. Ever watch the second hand on a clock (analog) tick its way around the dial, making its laborious way closer to quitting time for your shift at work or a class in school? Time is infinitely slower when we are locked down somewhere doing something we don’t want to do.
The opposite is true when we are fully engaged in something we enjoy. Then we look at the time and realize hours have flown by. Maybe making us late for something we don’t want to do, somewhere we don’t want to be.
I distinctly remember having my hair cut for summer after third or fourth grade. I was probably eight years old, or nine. The summer was just starting. Three months of no school stretched out before me. It would be forever before school started again. And then I thought to myself: It will take forever to get through the rest of school to graduate high school. It was an inconceivable amount of time ahead of me to get to that milestone. It was a distressing thought.
Now, today, I’m thinking it’s less than one week until the beginning of May. We’ve blown through four months of 2024, a third of the year. It’s been like a blink. It’ll be Christmas before we know it. Time is just moving too fast. It’s a distressing thought.
I read a long time ago how the perception of time moving is tied to how long a person has lived. So, for my nine-year-old self, high school graduation was the span of my whole life away. The three months of summer was a 1/36th of my lifetime.
Those same three months now are around a 1/250th sliver of my life. Ish. Any interval of time as we grow older becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of our entire lifetime. So when you’re a kid, or a young adult, time is perceived to be a large commodity, especially when stuck out there in our future. Think of the scope of starting a Roth IRA for retirement when you’re twenty, twenty-five, even thirty. Retirement is still a nebulous concept. The present and all its twist and turns distract you from the inevitability of time passing you by and fouling up your planning. All of a sudden, you’re fifty, fifty-five … Time to get serious about retirement. Uhm … And, no, winning the lottery is not a plan.
A Reader’s Digest’s “Day in the Life” quote by a woman really grabbed me. I read it long ago. “You really know you’re old when your youngest child comes home for Thanksgiving dinner and has gray hair.”   Point is, we are all getting older. Time doesn’t stop. It proceeds at a measured pace impervious to our wishes for it to speed up, slow down, go backwards. It just tick-tick-ticks on. Sixty seconds a minute. Three thousand-six hundred seconds an hour. Eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds a day. Thirty-one million,five hundred thirty-six thousand seconds a year. Tick-tick-tick.
About twenty-one million, eighty-one thousand-ish seconds till Christmas. Better start shopping.