Why the years fly by...

Who has not heard of, or experienced a unique phenomena in which time appears to move faster the longer one lives. The man of 70 watches years move by seemingly like a torrent, while the child of 4 feels as though time were barely moving at all. Why is this so? A mystery indeed. Perhaps, however, the gracious reader will find this musing a thought-provoking attempt to guess at the enigma.

I assert, as the thesis for this discussion, that our conception of the weight of time (an active consciousness of the passage of time and the events concurrent with that passage) is fixed in regards to every man’s experience of it in the present, and fixed in a man’s recollection of time in the past. Allow me to clarify this. My theory is that the actual experiencing of each moment is similar to every man at every age. Constrained to remain stationary for a period of five minutes, both the old and the young will watch the movement of the clock and experience the tedium of the wait with an equal sense of that time. Long-term memory, however, is different. Imagine that our sense of time is a fixed weight, as I postulated in my thesis. For the sake of illustration, imagine that each man has a weight-consciousness of 10 TW (time weight) pounds. For the child of 10, each year of his life has the equivalent of 1 TW pound in his memory. For the man of 50, the space of a year only bears the weight of 1/5 of a TW pound. To the older man, then, each year is less weighty in his memory. As one minute of time represents a smaller percentage of a man’s life, it has an equally smaller percentage of weight in his mind. This effect is further compounded, according to my theory, by an accompanying phenomenon of memory highlight retention.

I understand that this last term may be confusing, but permit me to define it briefly. By memory highlight retention I refer to what immediately enters a person’s mind in response to the question, “What have you accomplished in your life thus far?” Perhaps even the gracious reader is at this moment having a series of memories stretching back to childhood. My theory is that in the formation of memories, each man has a fixed number of memory highlight spaces in his mind, and these are updated and replaced as life experience indicates throughout the period of his life. One analogy for this idea is the function of RAM in modern computers. RAM (or Random Access Memory) is a fixed amount of memory, relatively small, which holds a information that is recalled frequently. Should a piece of information stored on the hard drive become more important that a piece of information in RAM, a switch occurs. The information of lesser value in RAM is sent to the hard drive, the piece of information of greater value on the hard drive is sent to RAM. I theorize that our minds are similar. At the earliest stages of life, many events have enough importance to occupy that space of our minds which is nearly instantly recalled if desired. As life continues, significant events begin to replace less significant ones. (This is perhaps a divine mercy, what burdens would each man bear every day if all of life’s woes were instantly recalled continuously every day!) For a child of 4, the highlights of his life will be culled from those years which he remembers well (perhaps the previous two years) and therefore each year will have a large percentage of memories occupying space of the mind I have called memory highlight retention. For the man of 60, there may be entire years without memories that come instantly to mind. This phenomena, in conjunction with the weight of time principle in the previous paragraph, works to give the illusion that as time passes the years move quicker. The passage of time, obviously, is in reality unchanged – but the weight of each moment in the mind of the individual is less and less with the passage of each new year.

That people are aware at some level of this illusion is apparent in the fact that it would not be uncommon to hear an elderly individual assert that they have had a “long day” (i.e. the present-tense experience of time has not changed) but, in the same conversation, also hear that “this year has just flown by” (i.e. the weight of this year in my memory is much lighter than was the weight of a year when I was younger). I hope that I have not confused the gracious reader entirely, but that I have perhaps sparked some thought. If you have managed to follow my thoughts thus far, I offer you one more.

How does this principle relate to God? I venture to the extremes of supposition on this point. If a person’s perception of the weight of time is inversely proportionate to the length of that person’s existence, then think what this would mean about God! As an infinite being, a minute of time would represent an immeasurably small percentage of His existence. To God, then, time would have virtually NO weight at all! Indeed, 10,000 years to us would seem to have the same weight to God as might 1 day. Or, if all time is to God weightless, 1 day for Him might as well be as 10,000 years for us.

Intrigued? Then please respond by leaving a comment and allow me the pleasure of hearing your thoughts.