Christmas comes round faster each year. As you grow older you experience that. Professor Ruth Ogden of John Moore University in Liverpool tells us that time drags when you’re bored and speeds up when you’re having fun. She also says it slows down when you are about to have a collision in your car.
So, it looks like time is what you make of it. You can make it longer or shorter according to your state of mind. You can also mix it up, confusing dates and times. As a six-year-old I had such an experience. I turned six in March, then as now, three months after Christmas. My mother gave me a book for my birthday. Its title is Now We Are Six, one of the Christopher Robin series by A.A.Milne.
Sadly, I have lost my copy, but the best part of a century later, I still remember some verses by heart. I remember the book’s hero saying, “Now I am six, I’m as clever as clever. I think I’ll be six now forever and ever.”
That is surely a case of trying to get time to conform to your wishes. I doubt though that many of us, reflecting on childhood, would really like to be six forever and ever.
My confusion with time arose when I found that I was remembering the book as a Christmas present, which it could not have been. My mom is not likely to have bought me a book with such a title for Christmas. It was a great present though and it gave to me my first love for literature, something for which I have always been grateful.
I started off this musing with the thought that time speeds up as you grow older. I believe there is a sense in which it really does. If you are six years old, a year, the time from one Christmas to the next, is a long time. It is one sixth of all the time you have lived. At that age a year is a long, long time. You wish it would go faster. If it would only speed up, maybe the you would get the bicycle, the sneakers or the game you’ve been longing for.
But when you are sixty, the time from one Christmas to the next is only one sixtieth of the time you’ve been alive. It is, as Omar Khayyam says of an entire life, “one moment in annihilation’s waste, one moment of the well of life to taste.”
Christmas came fast this year. It will come round faster next year. Also remember what the professor said about have fun. Time speeds up when you’re enjoying yourself. So have a good time on Christmas day because it will be over in the blink of an eye…
