Musings on Time Passing

My mom is 92 years old and in darn good physical shape for a woman of that age. No complaints about aches and pains. But she’s lost much of her memory. She didn’t know who I was when I visited a few months ago. That’s not unexpected since she hasn’t seen me a lot over the many years that I’ve lived overseas. But what is really telling is that she often didn’t recognize my brothers who see her just about every day.

Of course, this got me thinking about the passing of time. A lot of friends my age say that time is going so much faster now than when they were younger. I often feel that way as well. Of course, time moves on at the same pace it did a few days ago and a few years ago. It’s our perception of time that changes.

One article I read said that our perception of how time passes is colored by how much time we have left. No one has a definitive answer, but I’ve been think a lot about it as the time seems to be whizzing past me faster and faster. And in that process, I came up with some observations.

When I’m not doing anything interesting, the time seems to drag on and on forever. I remember when I worked in an office and how the clock seemed to move slower and slower as the end of the workday approached. I was always looking at the clock to see how much closer 5 pm was and wondering how time could possibly have slowed down so much.

When I’m in the process of doing something interesting, the time seems to fly by. I often spent the weekend on my favorite hobby — oil painting. And it seemed that those weekends passed by in the blink of an eye.

These two observations aren’t ground-breaking. I think everyone agrees that time seems to drag when we’re bored. We’ve all sat in school classrooms listening to a professor…

Related posts:

The Android multimedia framework includes support for recording and playing audio. In this blog post, we’ll develop a basic Sound Recorder application that is capable of recording audio and saving it…