by Jason Billingsley

Created on: February 17, 2010   Last Updated: February 18, 2010

We treat time like a commodity, spending it frivolously when we have it in abundance, managing it wisely, saving it like pennies in a mason jar when there isn’t enough of it to go around. When I was a child, an hour seemed to last all day. Now I can almost hear the whooshing sound as they fly by. Just as I begin to figure out how long it takes time to pass, it gets shorter.

Of course I think the problem may be me, not time. I look at my dogs, both napping without a care. I can’t prove it, but I’m reasonably certain that if they have any concept of time it is considerably different than my own.

They don’t follow a clock, or some conceptual measure of self-worth, or dwell on the years of fruitless ambitions. That’s not to say they don’t have ambitions. They dig under my fence with enthusiasm until a butterfly flutters by and they pursue that with the same enthusiasm. Yet, they never hunker over a stack of bills and regrets when neither ambition fails to pay dividends. They are perfectly happy to bite at flies until something more interesting comes along.

Most of us determine this feeling of accelerated time to be the result of chasing the clock. Meeting the deadlines, getting the kids to soccer practice, planning for the future; these things can keep our eyes glued to the second hand as it races us into the next minute, the next hour, the next day, but I think it may also be caused by retracing the clock. After all, time doesn’t seem to slow down after one retires and the deadlines disappear.

An African proverb says: "When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground." All the years stack up in our brains like a landfill of tattered keepsakes. Half of my life feels like it happened a hundred years ago when I trace back the miles of memories and yet I’m only 38 years old.

When you were a child your brain was like a small town. There was very little traffic, few distractions, and it took no time to get from place to place. As the town grows into a sprawling metropolis the traffic jams, the attractions twinkle and gleam from all around you and if your brain is like mine then there is always something going through it and you can lose an entire day in cross-town traffic.

Even with the constant tick-tock and the cluttered gigabytes of memories in my brain, I can still stretch out the hours from time to time with simple pleasures. Time seems to last longer when you take it instead of trying to make it.

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