They say that life – time specifically – accelerates as you age. I am sure I’ve written on this in the past. Time, of course, is constant, at least on our planet. It is as metered and consistent as one would hope; sort of. Initially time was derived from the division of the day first into 24 hours, then to 60 minutes, and lastly to 60 seconds each, for a total of 24 × 60 × 60 = 86,400 seconds per day. But the earth varies in its orbit and this fact necessitated adding a “leap second” periodically to offset this. But for as long as we’d had the notion of minutes and hours, the foundation was that a second is 1/86,400 of the earth’s rotation and this is still the basis of the Universal Time system

Around 60 years ago they changed the definition of a second to the numerical frequency of a Cesium 133 atom. The second […] is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the cesium frequency: the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the Cesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz (hertz). That is saying that a second is the duration of time it takes for 9 192 631 770 of these transitions to occur. Atomic clocks count these transitions, with an uncertainty of 1 second in 300 million years.

So time is, indeed, constant. Yet our perception of it is most certainly not. As Einstein once said: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.” And that pretty well sums it up for humans – the passage of time is relative to the moment, the experience.

As you move through life, days are long and casual; I remember a summer’s day playing in a dirt driveway and that day seemed to be endless. It’s not that it was remarkable, but at that age – guessing around 5 years old possibly – all I was doing was perfectly pleasant. But as the years pass, we get busier and busier: school, more school, work, more work, and then full-blown adulthood with a family and bills and work pressure. Competition for career growth becomes increasingly overwhelming as bills and debt mount due to the kids growing older and being more expensive. We learn to multi-task: arise ridiculously early in the morning, go to work, juggle meetings, projects, workloads etc., while also carving out time to get the car into the shop for an oil change and see the kids in their school play. Then get home, scarf down a quick supper before heading out to meet friends.

That frenetic schedule becomes regular and routine and we somehow (internally) manage to manipulate time in such a manner that what is seemingly 48 hours of commitments and tasks is neatly, easily, and almost unconsciously packed into less than 18 hours. We effectively slow time down. Not really of course, but it feels that way. I can recall counting stoplights along one of my regular routes so I could precisely estimate my required travel time. And it never felt like anything other than a normal day.

Now? Now if I have a doctor’s appointment at 1PM it is unlikely that I will do much else that day because – I have a doctor’s appointment after all! This is to imply that the day is short and there may not be time for anything else! Well, it’s really not quite that bad, but there is a noticeable difference in how you manage your time as you age. So when all you have is doctor’s appointment it fills vast tracts of time. And when that happens, time seems to pass much more quickly.