THE PASSAGE OF TIME

THE PASSAGE OF TIME

The prior blog entry [1] was a prelude to my birthday. The big one, 50. Half a century.

I had a comforting phone call with The Curmudgeon [2], a close friend 12 years my senior who agreed that 50 is a toughie. 60, he said is in some ways worse, in others ways not so. Yet it goes by much quicker. I told him that for a month Iíd been in a bit of a funk, and he said he, too, had had the same experience, approaching 50. He advised me that 60, though, while a more difficult age with which to reckon, comes and goes with equal pain, less discomfort.

When one is a child, the years are long and filled with events of great magnitude. The time span between dates of note seems endless, so very long. From one birthday to the next, from one holiday season to the next, the time between the first day of school after Summer VacationsÖ. These seem almost endless when one is a child. And the days and years are forever seemingly filled with new discoveries, new feelings, new knowledge, all sorts of enrichment for the mind and soul.

One gets older and the time spans seem to lessen. A year feels now like a week felt when I was ten. The Curmudgeon posited a theory that the sense of the passage of time is closely correlated to the amount of time one has left on the planet. The younger one is, the more there is ahead, thus the sense of time being a moving slowly. Those perceptions change as one has lived more ñused up some more of the allotted time, so to speakóand the end gets closer, thus the sensation of time elapsing draws much more rapidly.

That, hopefully, will do it for me on aging, birthday, notable decade passings, and such. For the time being, anyway.

Heh, heh.

Next entry will have to do with an interesting visual event that occurred on my birthday. But more on that later.