Life

I've figured out why life speeds up as you grow older. I thought I was really onto something until a quick internet search proved, much like everything else cool in my life I've thought up, someone has thought of it before me. But as the Antichrist Bono said, "Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."

Life speeds up as you get older since you have increasingly less of your life to pass through from point to point. Say you're five years old and you live one year to become six years old. You have added 20% of your life. But when you are 50 years old and you live one year to become 51, you have added only 2% of your life. If you graph that, as H.G. Wells described in "The Time Machine" saying that time if put on paper like width and height can be traveled, it's easy to see that one should traverse 2% of his life much faster than 20%.

That's why when you were young you couldn't wait for Christmas. It was never going to get here. But once you're older you find that if you only had a couple more weeks you could get everything done.

We used to live from point to point. School, summer, school, summer... and so on. Now there's no point. That sounds negative... I should say that now is what we used to not be able to wait to get to. The paradox is that now, we just want to get back.

My wife's grandmother died this morning. And I stand here looking at my seven month old son sleep. Why do I wait and wish for tomorrow? John Lennon said life is what happens while you're making other plans. Al Pacino's character in Glen Garry, Glen Ross said "We spend our lives looking forward or looking back. Where is the moment?"

Ain't it funny how time can fly when you turn your head and blink your eye.

This is what keeps me up at night.