How time quickly passes by
The passing of time in the lives of each person becomes a matter of consideration for all of people who live on this earth. Don’t we all often express to others how quickly time has passed since certain events in life. The remarks today will treat this phenomenon of the sensation of time passing by at a greater pace that it seemed too earlier in our lives.
As a way of illustration, let me mention how often I meet a former student or player and ask them about their age. Some I feel should be in their 20s or early 30s will state an age of the late 40s or 50s. It seems impossible. Our joint comments are something like “It seems like only yesterday…” or “It hasn’t been that long!” Our usual most common agreement is “Time really flies.”
With those comments out of the way, let us now examine whether time is moving faster today than it did earlier in our lives. I take us back some 45 or 50 years when an informative document was sent to me and possibly all math teachers. The document affirmed that time really does move faster as we become older. Many days don’t pass by that I don’t think of that document and how true it is and why it is true. Before someone calls or writes to tell me that there are still 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year, and that means time moves at the same rate it always did, the answer is, yes it does and no it doesn’t in our sense of conception. The fact is time does move at a different rate as we grow older. That statement seems impos- sible but read on and understand why the last sentence is true.
Math is involved here. It would be well that each reader was well versed in the mathematical concept of ratio and proportion. For those who don’t know what a ratio or proportion is let us look at the very basic definition. A ratio is a comparison of two numbers by division and can be expressed in many different forms. The fraction 2/ 3 is a ratio, and is the simplest way of expressing a ratio; the simple expression 45 divided by 15 is a ratio. A proportion is a statement saying two ratios are equal. The expression 2/ 3 = 10/ 15 is a proportion.
It has always been the conviction here that of all the concepts in the study of math, from basic math to higher areas, that a sound working knowledge of ratio and proportion will prove to be the most useful in more areas of life than any other. Let that be enough for explanation of those concepts so we can get to the idea of time moving faster as we grow older.
Now, sometime in the not too dis- tant past, I ran upon the statement (I don’t know where) that when we are young, days are short and years are long. Then, when we are older, days are long and years are short. I do know that in earlier days of life the time from a visit of Santa Claus to the next seemed like an eternity of time. Now, as I sit to write, it seems like the Christmas holiday was “just the other day.”
A year or any number of years can be compared to the total number of years you have lived. That number of years can be either small or large. When I was a year old, a year was 100 percent of the time I had been alive. When I turned twoyears old, a year was only 50 percent of the time I had been alive. Now that I am 81 years old, a year is just a small fraction of my whole life, or the 81 years I have been alive. The one year compared to the whole of life is a much smaller number, and therefore, a smaller part now than it was when I was 50 years old; using one as the numerator and your total years of life as the denominator, the ratio becomes smaller and smaller as we age.
One report said it best when it stated, “when you look back as you grow older, it seems that a year passes more quickly because the year is a much smaller part of the total time you have been alive than when you were younger.”
Yes, time does indeed pass by more quickly every day that we live than when we were quite a bit younger. In closing, it was Bruce Lee who said, “If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made of.”