I just learned that as of last month, I have been a member of seniorsonly for two years. I would have guessed no more than six months at best. I was thinking of a news event that happened a few months ago, certainly less than a year ago, and was reminded that it had happened in 2018, five years ago. I got out of the hospital two weeks ago. Four operations and groggier than a leprechan. They kept asking me if I knew my name and where I was. I did. After a few days I realized they were trying to ascertain how loose my thinking was, because every time someone asked how long I had been in the hospital, as they were also now frequently asking, I answered with a duration twice as long as the actuality. So after about 5 days, I was saying I had been there a day or two less than two weeks, maybe a full two weeks. I guess it's got something to do with the very natural changes of time perception one experiences in different periods of life. As a child, a day was a small eternity. As an young man, 200 years was comprehensible. Middle-aged, I could comprehend 2000 years as a not very long time. Now an elder, all time begins to appear "short". I would like to have the experience, but without misjudging the actual ("actual"?) passage of time. (Clocks and calendars aren't very helpful with this.)
There is some truth to that. As a child, summer was a very long time, but, as an adult, I don't accomplish even a quarter of the stuff that I want to get done before winter comes. The period between starting kindergarten and graduating from high school still seems as if were longer than the rest of my life.
I guess we're all aware that to a 5 year old, one year is 20% of their lives, while to a 50 year old, that same year is only 2% of their lives. And once you hit 30, the years become somewhat fungible, lacking the freshness and new experiences each one had up until that point. Yup. Before retirement, I had the chronological frame of reference afforded by my job. I knew where I worked and/or what I was doing when certain events happened (like the Challenger shuttle disaster, the 9/11 terrorist act, etc.) Now that I am retired, there is no frame of reference. Another thing that has mathematically messed with my head is the turning of the century. For some reason, maintaining a linear frame of reference became difficult in the new millennia (which began Jan 1, 2001.)
There was a character in a novel I read named Billy Pilgrim. I’ve always identified with him because of his claim that he was “unstuck in time”. I’ve felt like that most of my life and my wife has very slowly learned that it is pointless to ask me any question starting with the word “when”.