Endless Summers

My working life is based on 30 minute blocks of time.

This has been the case for the last 33 years and so I have developed a sensory ability to track time in such increments.

If I have a busy workload the day simply flies past and I am left wondering where on earth the hours have gone.

That sensation of time going quickly, perhaps too quickly is something that we are all aware of and the older you get the phenomena of evaporating minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years becomes even more acute.

So why is that?

There are many theories around this discrepancy between actual time and perceived time.

In plain speak we feel that there is a difference between the time that the hands on the clock display and the time that we recognise in our heads. It is a mixture, a combination of mystical influences, mental processes and mathematics.

There are those in the scientific community who attribute this to Proportional Theory.

In its simplest form this relates to how much one day or a period of time takes up in our lives. For example, my first day on this planet as a new born baby represented 100% of my existence. I am now approaching my 55th birthday and so today was about one twenty thousandth and eighty one'ths of my life to date, a very small fraction indeed so it is no surprise that I perceive today to have passed extremely rapidly.

There are other complicating factors and just think back to your childhood days to experience just a few aspects of this. You will remember that the days of your summer holidays from school seemed to last forever, and yes, you recollect that they were also cloudless, warm and carefree days. That feeling was down to the trait of childhood of always looking forward to the next new thrill and excitement and getting tired and bored of current activities or events, so much so that time in effect dragged although not at all in a bad way.

How many times did you annoy your parents or guardians with the incessant chant, whilst on a journey, of "Are we there yet?, Are we there yet?

Fast forward in our lives to adulthood and we are not so much looking forward to new things as just re-living familiar routines and practices so that time, again, gives the impression of flying. That loss of childish fascination and freshness is something that many of us regret. It was a time of intense and vivid experiences which actually made time itself stretch and seemingly become endless.

Unfortunately, the demands of our modern lives make it necessary to process more things in our minds, analyse and categorise them with the inevitable effect of our becoming desensitised and on automatic pilot rather than being immersed in a certain situation.

Perhaps the best illustration of this for me is when I am driving the car. A high proportion of my 30 minute blocks of work time are spent on the road and although I am able to concentrate fully on safe motoring there is still a distinct sensation of a quickening of time.

That is clearly illogical as I am not time travelling nor do speed and distance distort and condense.

That is where scientists have a bit of a knowledge gap. There is little by way of understanding of the brain and whether it has a sort of sensory clock built in. After all, we do not have a specific organ for time to work alongside our other senses of smell, touch, taste, sight and hearing. In fact, there are those who see time as meta-sensory in that it sits above the human senses.

There is no medical evidence of a time accumulator or mechanism in the neurons of the human brain, no mental ticker or background monitor to help us manage our daily lives.

It comes down to a combination of perceptions, emotions and memories which are, to me, the most valuable pieces of the whole human existence.

In reality, well, I have just expended, by my reckoning, about an hour in the writing of this piece and yet it seems no be no more than a few scant minutes of activity. Actually, it has flown past as that hour represents a mere fraction or one four hundred and eighty one thousand nine hundred and sixty fifths of my existence to date.