Time: Fast, Slow, or otherwise?

Wow, today is Dec. 14. Only a week and a half until Christmas Day. Where has this year gone? Seems like only yesterday we were anticipating news of a job offer for my husband, and determining if we move up here. Now, we'll be spending our 2nd Christmas here in a few short days.

When you're a kid, time seems to drag on. It's seems like years between Christmases, or your birthday. If you have to be a certain age to do something special like drive, pierce ears, or what have you, those milestones always take a long time coming. It seemed like school just went on and on and on. Time was like a tortoise, slowly and steadily marching onward, in no hurry.

Then at some point,as I grew older, time picked up speed. I can remember hearing the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon being advertised and thinking "didn't they just have that on TV a month or two ago?!" I was probably a teenager then, and life was going at a pretty fast clip. I was busy living by the calendar with reports, exams, part-time jobs, and school-imposed deadlines. I had little time to pay attention to time, so it snuck right on past me.

Now, time has the pedal to the metal. Every time I look up and catch my breath, it's Christmas! "Didn't we just do all this last year?!" Yes, but ti's time again! "But I just got all the Christmas decorations put up in their proper places!" So what... get them out again. And so the conversation in my head goes each year. I think once I had children, time has never flown so quickly. Sometimes I just wish I could hit a big pause button somewhere, stop the kids from growing, stop their school deadlines, stop the onslaught of Cub Scout meetings and piano lessons, and just rest. Just pause, for a couple days' time, and enjoy each other, then hit the play button and get back to real life. Alas, I've yet to find either button.

Even if I don't spot time marching onwards in my own life, or in my own children, I see it especially in my friends' children, whom I don't' see on a regular basis. Photo Christmas cards are good for that, too, documenting a moment in time of a dear one's children, then marveling how much they have matured since the year before. I've gotten where I keep all my photo Christmas cards, and tuck them away with my decorations. Then the next year, when I unpack it all, I can see how families looked last year, and compare them to this year's crop of cards.

I'm not the first to wax philosophical about time, and I won't be the last. I just find it amazing that it's happening to me. LOL It was always the old ladies we knew who said "my, how you've grown" or "my, how time flies." Now I'm saying it, and I consider myself far from being an old lady!

I'm not sad that time appears to move faster now for me now that when I was a kid. Obviously, only my perspective has changed. Time continues to move at its own God-set pace. They haven't taken away any hours in the day or year to make up for time going faster. It's merely how I see things. And that's okay, that's how it's supposed to be. if I had realized all this as a child, I guess I wouldn't have been a child anymore. I just think about my grandmother, in her 80's. It must seem like there is no point even buying a calendar anymore; as soon as a month comes, it's over. That's got to feel weird. Natural, as in the way her perspective changes, but still weird. I'll let you know in another 40 years just how weird it is.