Tempus fugit

Just yesterday, I told myself that "we have a whole summer ahead of us."  Now, I find myself entering the second week of August.  Leaves on roadside bushes are beginning to turn yellowish and reddish.  The days are hot -- we've had a magnificent summer in the Northwest Corner -- but the evenings are noticeably cooler.  A few weeks ago, it was broad daylight at 5 a.m. and 9 p.m.

Now it's not.

So the summer is anticipated, it's greeted joyfully, and -- before you know it -- it's on its way out.

'Twas not always thus.  Why, when I was a kid, it took an eternity of yearning for school to be out and summer to be in -- but once here, summer went on forever.  Whatever happened?

Theories abound as to why time seems to go by faster as we get older.  My favorite has always been the proportion theory -- three months is a far greater percentage of your lifetime to date when you're ten than when you're fifty, and so three months seem to last longer when you're younger.  The theory is attractive, but scientists have questioned whether we really consider our life as a totality when judging the passage of time.

Claudia Hammond has come out with a book that discusses this question, together with many other questions related to our perception of time: Time Warped.  I haven't read the book yet, satisfying myself with scanning a number of reviews.  Hammond suggests that time goes by more slowly when we are young because we find ourselves confronted during those years with a large number of new experiences, each of which demands our close attention.  As we grow older, we tend to glide through life on cruise control, half awake while experience passes us by.  

[S]he argues that the real reason for the quickening of time is that a high concentration of strong memories occur in the teens and 20s, making that period a “benchmark for our judgments of retrospective time.” As new memories become sparser, later life seems brief compared with our eventful youth, giving the illusion that time has sped up.¹

This depressing theory has some intuitive appeal, and may explain the frantic desire for new experiences that many of us subconsciously feel as we age and our teen years recede swiftly into the past.

On the other hand, Hammond also notes that time seems to pass more swiftly when we are intently focused on absorbing activities than when we are sitting around being bored.  Apparently, we are faced with a trade-off between time passing quickly while we're actively engaged in interesting activities and time seeming to have passed more slowly in retrospect -- in other words, an active two-week vacation seems to go by quickly but -- when we look back on it -- we feel it lasted much longer than two weeks.

An interesting quandary.  But maybe only in theory.  I've had a fairly active and interesting summer, and yet -- here we are -- with those leaves already starting to turn.  It was still too fast a summer.  I guess the only real solution would be to wake up and find myself a 15-year-old again.  But like all too many "solutions," that too would have its own unintended (because thankfully forgotten) consequences.      
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¹Jascha Hoffman, New York Times (August 5, 2013).