Tick Tock

I've often heard said, mostly by relatives, that time moves more quickly with age.  I had my doubts.  I can count one to three hundred sixty Mississippis at the same rate as my seven-year old self, and they would still correspond to the clock.  So how is it that said relatives were completely spot-on?

Tomorrow, I walk the lines of graduation (or sashay, depending on my mood). Eighteen years of classrooms, eighteen years of grades and homework, eighteen years of an academic authority attempting to convey the workings of the universe into my uninformed brain, have all come to a conclusion. Up to this point, I have measured the passing of time in grades, Kindergarten through two senior years. Each year had a meaning, each its own set of friends and memories. I could say "Yeah, back in fifth grade, bladi bladi blah," but now, what happens?

Up until this point, schooling has given my life structure. I could rely on an autumn start and a spring finish with slight mental relaxation in between, but come Autumn 2010, there will be no new start. Ideally, I will already be employed by that time in a position that most likely is not determined by the seasons. Then the challenge emerges of how to restructure my sense of time. The standard approach seems to divide life into decades "In my 20s, 30s, 70s" et cetera, but it seems that doing so robs the day, month, and year of their meaning. Perhaps this is why they say time speeds up with age; the days lose their interest and blend together.

I believe this pattern is a choice. Yes, the schedule of life has to change, unless a person is inherently wealthy and can pay for a lifetime of college education, but it is a choice to slip into the web of the mundane. A frenzied world inherently resists giving due credit each smaller block of time, and the human brain can hold finite amounts of memory before it starts to clear the space; nonetheless, it should be the goal of each and every person to do something in a year that makes it worth remembering. "In my 20s" is a dismissive phrase. "The year I climbed my first mountain..." "The year I quit smoking..." "The year I took that road trip to Canada..." All give respect to the years they describe and add layers of richness to the experience of life without having to remember the details of dates.

Perhaps by adopting this approach, what has been described as an insipid vortex beyond formal education may yet be revealed to be nothing more than a doorway to a lifetime of educated informality.