Robert Gerard Hunt Stories. Commentary. Endorphins. Updated every Friday.

Acceleration

Today is my 42nd birthday, and I am beginning to think that I might be  experiencing one of the most enjoyable seasons of my life.  It's hard to tell for sure, as such grand evaluations are truly valid only in retrospect.  In fact, without knowing the near and distant future, it's impossible to say whether I will one day remember these years as some of the best.  But I have an inkling that I am living the golden days right now, despite various challenges that might lead me to conclude otherwise.  I have arrived at this belief after observing the way in which I currently experience the passage of time.

It's one of the peculiarities of life that time seems to accelerate as we age.  Intellectually, I can grasp this, because there is a logical reason behind it.  We measure the passage of time with unchanging, defined intervals:  hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades.  As we grow older, any one of those intervals represents an ever-decreasing percentage of our longevity.  On my fifth birthday, for example, one year was equivalent to 20% of the entire time I had been alive.  But today, at 42, one year is merely 2% of my existence.  Consequently, I perceive the passage of one year as occurring much more rapidly now than I did when I was five.

Consider, however, my current perception of a decade compared to that of my parents, who are both 77.  A decade is still a considerable chunk of my life (24%), but for Mom and Dad, 10 years is a significantly smaller portion of their lives (13%).  Yet I look back at the most recent decade, and I am amazed at how much faster it went by than the 90's, 80's, or 70's.  It seems like only yesterday we were partying like it was 1999 and wondering if we should stock up on bottled water in the event of worldwide Y2K infrastructure failure, and now here we are, already cruising toward the end of 2010.  If that is the way I see the passage of 10 years, how much faster it must seem to Mom and Dad!  Thus, I take them at their word when they assert that "time is just flashing by."

Should I live long enough, I assume I am destined for the same sense of time perception as that of my parents, who give me the impression that the days, weeks, months and years are going by a little faster than they would like.  Of course, this will always be the case for them, as there's no going back to younger years.  This is why I suspect that I may be enjoying the best-paced years of my life;  right now, the passage of time is almost perfectly at the rate that I would like it to be.

My time-passage preferences are based on a delicate blend of all things good and bad as well as tolerable doses of Central Ohio weather extremities.  As a boy, I unwittingly enjoyed how my naive time-sense made summer vacations seem like incredibly generous stretches of idle hours, with time to waste and then some.  Even a single Saturday during the school year appeared to be so far from Monday that there was no sense giving a thought to going back to school until at least Sunday evening.  This is a great way to experience time, but only so long as you happen to be having a good time.  The converse of this phenomenon is how unbearably long all of the not-so-enjoyable stuff seems to last.  Going back to school on Monday was like a prison sentence  until Friday.  The weeks between Halloween and Christmas were interminable.  Worst of all, the dark and relentless Ohio winters cast an apparently permanent pall over the land, as though the warmth and sunshine of spring would never return.

These days, everything I anticipate seems to come around in due time, and those things which I find disagreeable pass by before they become too burdensome.  I've learned that a good portion of the joy we experience from any event is the period leading up to it, during which our lives are brightened by the prospect of something fun on the horizon.  I know that once the event is experienced, it's gone, save for the memory of it, and so I've gained enough patience to enjoy the interim.  Likewise, I've finally been alive long enough that the dull and unpleasant times seem more like bumps in the road than unbroken stretches of miserable tedium.

It's a very agreeable mix that allows me to draw  maximum enjoyment out of all that is good and minimum exposure to all that is bad.  I'm trying to savor it while it lasts, because I know that time is only getting faster.  In another ten years or so, I expect to feel the first twinges of discomfort over just how fast any given unit of time passes.  A further decade out, I'll start to actively complain about it.  Should I reach my seventies, I'll lament how quickly my retirement is passing.  In my eighties, I'll be able to discern the steady movement of the hour hand on my clock.  And if I make it into the nineties, I will surely have the unpleasant sensation that I am hurtling toward my death.

According to the 2010 U.S. Census Statistical Abstract, I may statistically look forward to 36.1 more years of existence, putting my total life expectancy at 78 years.  And, if I'm truly average, I'll die at approximately noon on Tuesday, September 4, 2046, right after Labor Day (will it have been something I ate?).  A bit sobering, really, in light of the fact that I just acknowledged how quickly the last decade elapsed.  Statistically speaking, I am due for only three and a half more!  The census abstract table does not have a special column for 42-year-old white males who are currently teaching a 15-year-old daughter how to drive, but if this were taken into consideration, I would expect my probable longevity to be even shorter, perhaps dramatically so.

So before this rolling stone gathers even more speed along my lifelong descent toward oblivion, I'm taking a moment to appreciate the scenery during what may be the approximate middle of my trip.  Right now, the passage of time is nearly perfect, and when perfection in any form enters our lives, we would be wise to enjoy it while it lasts.

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