Time

I'll post here soon something showing the most common search terms and posts from this past year, but I don't like posting that kind of thing until the year is over. What if something totally awesome happens on December 30th and doesn't show up in any of top 10 lists because they had been put together before the year was over? It could be like how I got to go to two Rotary Club dinners when I earned my Eagle Scout, because I earned it near the end of one year, but it was awarded to me the next year. Of course, it could be the opposite, where the top thing never gets recognized because it slips in the crack between the two years.

In the meantime, I'll say that it seems like time is moving faster and faster each year. A friend of mine shows the math and how it works that as you are younger, a year is a larger percent of your life, but as you get older, each year is smaller and smaller relative to all the things you've already experienced. Then the point is to think about how we get on kids for not being able to sit through a one hour meeting, but an hour for them is the equivalent of like a week for adults. The math is fun and interesting, but most importantly, I think it's true. An older couple in our neighborhood talks about how they don't feel like they are old - they feel like they're the same people they were 50, 60, or 70 years ago. They are, yet they're not.

I heard someone explain it that as you turn a year older, you are the new age, but you are also all the previous ages. So while I'm currently 36, I'm also at the same time 25, 18, 12, 8, 2, and every age in between. I need now the things a 36 year old needs, plus the same things I needed when I was in kindergarten, when I was just starting to drive, and when I graduated college.

I hesitate to believe much of what the scientists say about how old our earth is and how time affects us, because I don't think we really understand it as well as they claim we do. We can use the limited portion of the concept of time that we do understand to measure certain things and make some guesses about what has happened recently or what will happen soon, but while we perceive time as constant, it's probably more like a Doppler effect, where frequencies speed up or slow down depending on the relative position and velocities of objects in motion. Get too far away from our current situation and it breaks down and fails to measure our progress consistently.