Not Wheels But Wings: or, Thoughts on the Passage of Time

Halloween is a time when adults shamelessly revisit childhood, and I am all for it. Every year I string up orange lights, carve an albino pumpkin the shape of a hockey mask, attend horror-movie festivals, and revisit all my favorite horror classics. If I am very lucky I am invited to one of those Hollywood Make-up Effects parties where the costumes, having been constructed by people who do it for a living, are off-the-chart amazing. I tend to hold on fairly hard to Halloween, because once I let go of it, the inevitable slide into the end of the year begins -- Thanksgiving, Christmas New Year's Eve, each one arriving seemingly on the heels of the other.

It's a cliche that time moves more swiftly as you get older, but cliches are in use for a reason, and this one happens to be truer than most. When I was fifteen, a year may as well have been a decade. Now, at 44, it goes by what seems like a single season. If the progression continues, by the time I'm in my 50s each year will feel like about six weeks.

It is said that there are two types of time, mechanical and human. For a clock, every unit of time -- seconds, minutes, hours -- are all precisely the same. For a human, the speed with which time moves is literally subjective -- not only does it vary from person to person, it varies from mood to mood. "Pain passes slowly, and pleasure's gone too soon," as one song lyric put it, and this is true. Thirty seconds is an eyeblink when you are trying to say goodbye to someone you love, and it feels like three hours when stuck on an elevator with someone you hate. However, the overall trend remains the same -- with each passing year, the years feel shorter.

I am fairly certain I know almost precisely when I realized this. I was 29 years of age, and working as a supervising investigator for the District Attorney's Office in a small town in Pennsylvania. The day in question I was visiting my mom in Maryland for the weekend, and taking a walk on the streets where I had grown up. As you know by now, my career choice was a mistake. I had neither the passion nor the patience for criminal justice and I knew that by sticking to an unsuitable profession I was not only making myself unhappy, I was, as Orwell put it, "outraging my true nature." From a very young age I knew I was supposed to be a writer, I had won awards for it in school, been published in a literary magazine at 17, and at the age of 20 had famous novelists like Reynolds Price and E.L. Doctorow reading my work on the contest circuit.
Yet here I was, nearly thirty, living in a dismal little town doing a tedious job, surrounded by co-workers that, generally speaking, I distrusted and slightly disliked, writing nothing. Time ought to have been dragging; instead it seemed to be flying by. As I walked down a shallow hill, a sentence came into my head: "He was at the end of my twenties when he realized time had not grown wheels but wings."

I'm a writer, so thoughts like that -- snatches of dialogue, chunks of description, outbursts of lyric poetry, parts of scenes or fragments of story ideas -- are not unusual. Stephen King once said the entire idea for Pet Sematary came to him while crossing the road in front of his house. This particular thought, however, struck deeper than most, because my job had never been intended as a career. I had entered the world of law enforcement strictly as a means of garnering life experience which I thought would add substance to my writing. Also, to pay the bills while I composed my first novel. Yet after five years in the trade, I was no closer to beginning that novel than the day I had been handed my badge. The pressures of work had sapped my creative drive...and time was passing more and more quickly. The dismay I was feeling had begun to graduate to fear. Though I was young and fit and vital, it was as though I could feel the cold shadow of death over me -- though perhaps not so much physical death as the death of possibility, the death of dreams. There are periods in life when one is fully conscious of the full range of opportunities and possibilities open to them: we call this period youth, and when it begins to curdle into the earliest part of middle age -- roughly speaking, the thirties -- we become just as conscious that many of those possibilities have faded away. Of course the very act of choosing one course in life eliminates the others, at least temporarily; but as we age some of those losses become permanent. At a certain point it is no longer possible to become, for example, a professional athlete or a fighter pilot. I was 29, and while many courses remained at least theoretically open to me, they seemed to be sliding shut in unison before my disbelieving eyes.

The human sense of time -- the way we measure our lives by the clock -- makes us unique among the species on this planet. Other animals move with time; we, being more conscious of its passage and what that passage represents, fight against it. We are conscious of our own mortality even when we are not threatened by external danger, and this consciousness drives us in different directions. In my case it drove me out of my job. Having resigned, for six months I did almost nothing but write, and though what I was writing was raw, overdrawn and without much structure, the pleasure of tapping into my neglected abilities more than made up for the knowledge that sooner or later I would have to go back to work.

I am not writing a biography here and don't want to bog down in my life story, details of which are already scattered throughout these blogs. Suffice to say (again) that a few years later, having resumed work in my hated field and once again found it intolerable, I decided for the final time that criminal justice was not the answer -- not even to the problem of paying my rent. The time had come to find a new trade while I sharpened my skills and learned the minutia of my craft. So, at the age of 32, I went back to school, to get a second undergraduate degree. I know, I know -- I just said I wasn't writing a biography, but this detail is crucial, because it was during this period, especially the first of my two school years, that I once again experienced a difference in the way I perceived time. For the first time since my middle twenties, it was slowing down.

I can still recall the feeling of surprised joy this realization gave me. It was just five or six weeks into my "freshman" year, and it felt as if I had been in school for six months or more. Not because I was miserable, either: on the contrary, the decision to become a student again -- but this time having my own, rather luxurious apartment, a car, and the life experience of a grown man -- was probably the only stroke of authentic genius I've ever had in my life. I was happy for the first time in probably seven years, and my only fear was that time would somehow find the accelerator again and begin to pass in its familiar, unwanted blur.

Of course this is precisely what happened. My second semester passed a little faster than my first, and my third considerably faster than my second. Before I knew it I was facing graduation and the necessity of getting into graduate school. That was in 2004, and I do believe that each year since has passed slightly with greater perceived speed than the one before, until the last few -- the last two or three in particular -- were gone as soon as glimpsed. When I began keeping a daily journal, in 2006, the time period between writing the January 1 and the December 31st entries seemed enormous. Now it seems like the elapsed time between a bullet leaving a gun and it hitting the goddamn target.

All this demands a question -- actually two questions. Why does time speed up as we age, and why was I able, if only briefly, to slow it down?

As I had absolutely no answers to this, and not even anything that could be described as a theory, I consulted the Scientific American, specifically an article by Jordan Gaines Lewis. Mr. Lewis writes as follows:

"Psychologist William James, in his 1890 text Principles of Psychology, wrote that as we age, time seems to speed up because adulthood is accompanied by fewer and fewer memorable events. When the passage of time is measured by “firsts” (first kiss, first day of school, first family vacation), the lack of new experiences in adulthood, James morosely argues, causes “the days and weeks [to] smooth themselves out…and the years grow hollow and collapse.”

In the early 1960s, Wallach and Green studied this phenomenon in groups of younger (18-20 years) and older (median age 71 years) subjects through the use of metaphors. Young people were more likely to select static metaphors to describe the passage of time (such as “time is a quiet, motionless ocean”). Older folks, on the other hand, described time with swift metaphors (“time is a speeding train”). In research by Joubert (1990), young subjects, when asked, said that they expect time to pass more rapidly when they become older."

The article is worth reading in its entirety, but Gaines concludes that there are five reasons why time, which begins for us as a crawling infant, develops first wheels and then wings. The reasons are:

1. We gauge time by memorable events, and memorable events are more common to youth, when our lives are by definition full of new experiences: with age comes routine.

2. The amount of time passed relative to one's age varies. High school seemed endless to me in part because the four years involved were, at the time of their completion, about one quarter of my life. Four years today would represent less than 10% of my life.

3. Our biological clock slows with age. This is theory, but Gaines allows for the possibility of an "internal pacemaker" which, as we age, does not keep pace with mechanical time, creating a false perception of time acceleration.

4. Children pay more attention to time than adults, because they are constantly counting down the minutes until things like birthdays, Christmastime...and Halloween.

5. Stress. Stress increases with age, and evidently creates a perception that "there is not enough time to get things done."

It is really this last factor which is the crucial one in my mind, for while he may not have meant it this way, I believe Gaines is implying here that this feeling of not having enough time expands to encompass life itself -- that our time is running out, that the reaper will knock his bony fingers on our doors before we've worked our way through our respective bucket lists. It is a fear as old as mankind's ability to contemplate life, and was perhaps best summed up by John Keats 200 years ago in his poem, "When I Have Fears I May Cease To Be:"

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

This more or less answers the first question. What about the second?

It seems that leaving the work force and its attendant grind, for a school environment which offered a totally different set of (welcome) challenges, so disrupted my sense of time that it fell of its track entirely for as long as six months or more. It wasn't just the excitement or the intellectual stimulation; it was the varying nature of my days. Different days brought different classes, different faces, different areas of study. My routines were not routine; they varied even within themselves, giving me a sense that no two weeks were ever completely alike. What was more, the whole experience fell under the heading of "memorable event." Returning to the college, at 32, where you arrived as a newly-minted eighteen year-old, was a tremendous moment for me, a sort of full-circle moment where I realized I had given myself a chance to do what so few people ever do: start life over from scratch. It was only when I began to settle into the groove of my new life that time hit the gas once more.

Obviously the problem here is that one cannot constantly start life over from scratch. We only get so many pages to turn. And until recently I prided myself that I was more active and more diverse in my collection of experiences than most around me anyway. In the last few years I have made a point of trying to collect new experiences almost as another man might collect rare coins or stamps or butterflies, and Los Angeles is a pretty good place to do that. Yet my perception of time has not slowed; therefore I can only conclude that my addiction to everyday routine, which I use to give myself a feeling of security and comfort, is actually working against me. Individual experiences collected weekly or bi-weekly are not enough, it seems, to counteract the gravity created by the sameness of my days. I have to find a way to introduce an element of friendly instability into my life again. I have to keep myself off-balance in the most positive possible way, by taking risks, being impulsive, and going against my own grain whenever possible. Most importantly I must not rest on any imagined laurels in the experience department. Humans survive psychologically in an unstable world by adapting themselves rapidly to change; but as I have learned, this adaptability comes with a price. The quicker we achieve a sense of normalcy about something that was hitherto exciting, the quicker it becomes a bore. And the faster our lives go.

So on a holiday largely designed for children, my advice to you is to try to incorporate some of the lessons of childhood back into your own life. Try to make more memories. Try to pay more attention to time. Get excited about events in the future. Be a little daring, a little impulsive, a little faster to break away from your routines. And above all, allow yourself to be scared. After all...it's Halloween.