Time and its Convolutions

Life is the course of events that occur over a certain, though likely unforeseeable period of time. One thing I have always noticed about time is that our perception of time varies. In general, it seems that time speeds by when we are very busy or enjoying ourselves immensely, but drags by interminably whenever we must sit idle (as in a dentist's office--partial remedy is to bring a book), or when we are bored. It is especially slow to our perception when we are eager/anxious for something to occur that will be happening sometime in the future.

Another aspect of this amalgam of time and consciousness exists in the tendency for our awareness of time's passage to speed up as we get older. My uncle explained his theory regarding this phenomenon to me a few years ago, and it made perfect sense to me. When one is four years old, a year is 25% of one's life, while when one is twenty, a year is only 5% of one's life, and so on. So for those of us who are over thirty, when we are surprised at how fast a year has gone by, we should remember that a year is less, percentage-wise, of our life, so it makes sense that it seems shorter than it did in our childhood.

I am sure that there is more to our changing time consciousness than this, but I like this simple paradigm. In general a simple paradigm almost always hides a complicated structure underneath, with myriads of different possibilities and sidetracking ideas. This is especially true in the pursuit of randomosity--you knew that was coming, though, didn't you?!

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