Speeding Through The Years...

Have you ever noticed how, the older you get, the faster time seems to fly? Yes, me too.

I started watching Cray Wanderers in 1967, not long after I had reached the grand old age of 12 years, yet it seems like only yesterday. I spent most of the 1970s serving as a committee member for the club; that time spent also still seems like yesterday. I can recall both eras with a high degree of accuracy.

But, I am no longer a young whippersnapper, I'm just one of those old farts that I and many of my contemporaries used to make fun of. Ageing is a strange phenomenon and one that we couldn't possibly understand or comprehend in our youth. When you are young you think that ageing is what happens to old people; it doesn't occur to any of us when we're young that we will eventually grow old ourselves.

To put another slant on time, what you or I experience about it may result in two totally different experiences. Your perception of time may not necessarily agree with my perception of it. And, by a similar token, what a young person perceives about time may not correlate with what an older person perceives it to be.

Time when we are young does not appear to be relative to time when we are older, that is for sure. The summer holidays away from school always seemed to stretch far further that 6 weeks, especially if you got bored after just a couple of weeks, yet the same time period in later years goes within a blink of an eye. This seems to have something to do with how much slower our reaction times are as we grow older when compared to how much more quickly our reactions were when we were infants, teens or even twenty-somethings.

Are our minds playing tricks on us? That is one possibility. Another possibility is that we can't cram so much activity into our lives when we are old compared to how we managed to when we were in our youth so time, although things take longer to achieve, passes us by in a flicker. Yes, it is a strange paradox that, the more you can achieve in one hour the slower the time goes but the less you can manage in that same one hour inveigles the sense of time speeding along.

So, what's the solution? Don't grow old? Try to maintain or obtain a second wind? Accept the situation? Who knows?

My dear old dad often said to me and my siblings that we'd grow old one day; that life slows down but time speeds up. Of course we didn't take much notice of him; we were all youngsters and he was getting on a bit. What did he know? Quite a lot, as I now know, and as both my dad and I found out through experience. Little did I know that my 50s would come around sooner than I expected and I'd arrived at dad's age in a trice, while he'd moved on to being really old!

And memories themselves can play tricks. When you get old, you remember things from yesteryear and you can still recall them with such clarity. But, just you try to remember what you had for lunch two days ago...