There's an old saying that the older you get, the faster life goes.
It's painfully true.
A theory has been postulated that time is simply a sensory effect of the intersection of our minds with the interplay of quantum materials; as mathematics has proven the existence of a number of dimensions, and we are only capable of sensing four of them, we are woefully and inadequately equipped to deal with -- let alone control -- the passage of time.
From a computational perspective, it is as though our brains - these biological mechanisms which act as vast parallel 'computers' - accumulate processes throughout our lives which require slices of time in order to perform their proper function. As the time required to execute these processes aggregate into a larger portion of our waking hours, our perception of the relative velocity of time changes. We begin to experience individual moments in time as occurring further and further apart; that is, when that portion of our mind which looks at the internal clock to synchronize itself with the outside world is taking longer and longer between 'peeks', with the result that we perceive time as moving faster and faster.
This is especially true in the latter years as our physiological processes take longer and longer to execute as they try to work around all the damaged circuits which have occurred over the years due to age, injury, accident, or cumulative medical effects (e.g. taking migraine meds every day for millions of years).
And of course there is the issue of trusting our memory. As has been proven in numerous studies, our memories are inherently faulty and subject to alteration during recollection, such that our memories of our younger lives are simply not to be trusted. We may think that time passed slower in our younger days, but that is because we had far fewer memories to process, and far fewer tasks to accomplish.
And, worse of all, our recollections of shared events are never the same as those of the people with whom we shared them. This was brought home to me rather recently when I was sharing some memories of my life back in New York with someone who was actually there. And she had completely different memories of the events, to the point where I wondered if I had only dreamed them.
It is one of the most frustrating things about being human.
On a side note, this calls into question the stories we have heard and/or read by authors who did not actually write them down until years (or decades) after the events occurred. How can we trust such accounts? We know that the probability of providing an accurate account after all those years is unfathomably small, and that the best we can hope for is to gather enough witnesses to accumulate, among the wide variance of accounts, some core agreement of the event for which we can have some modicum of confidence.
Photographs help. Videos are even better.
Now I wish that I'd captured more moments of my life in some form of indestructible medium. Or that someone had invented some kind of time-travel device which, without violating the laws of physics, allows me to travel back in time through my own experiences -- strictly as an observer, of course; no murdering my grandfather to test the Paradox Theory!! -- just to make sure my brain hasn't turned to mush over the last fifty years.
But back to the subject at hand. A new year has arrived. What am I going to do about it?
It occurs to me that over the past few years, the one thing that has bothered me most of all is my inability to acquire and maintain friendships. I am not a good friend, being a total washout when it comes to time management and thus being resentful of people who require my attention when I have a huge backlog of Things To Do. For this coming year, I would like to take a few baby steps to establish (and re-establish) some friendships so that when it comes my time to "shut down all processes and exit this mortal realm", there might actually be some people beyond the family circle who think of me.
And not because I owe them money.
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