Christina Metcalf

My father-in-law recently said, “Time is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.”

Science will tell you that’s because of the proportionality theory. When you’re a child, a single year is a much larger fraction of your entire life. 

For a 10-year-old, a year is 10% of their life so far, filled with new experiences and rapid development. For a 50-year-old, a year is only 2% of their life. 

This smaller fraction makes each year feel less significant and shorter.

Novel Is Better

My husband and I are very different people. He likes the comfort of known spots, favorite dishes, and solid expectations.

I, on the other hand, love novel things, tastes, and trips.

While he indulges my deep desire for new experiences, doing so can sometimes make him cranky. (Sorry, honey.)

But I’m not wrong for wanting novel. (Variety is the spice of life.)

Not only does it make life richer, novelty keeps you thinking and adapting.

After all, when something is new, you don’t know how to react based on a set of similar past circumstances. You have to come up with new reactions.

When you’re young, the brain is constantly encoding new memories—first day of school, first bike ride, first time at the beach. These “firsts” hit hard. They are standouts in our memory.

The abundance of these new experiences makes time feel like it’s passing slowly.

As we get older, our lives become more routine. We settle into jobs.

Our daily activities become more predictable. We often feel like we’re on auto-pilot.

When we are, our brains don’t need to work as hard. These familiar experiences get stored in the same way your computer files new copies of the same file “Day.doc and Day.doc(2). 

Since we’re creating fewer new memories to distinguish one day or week from the next, our brains tend to lump similar periods together like Gmail nests the same string of emails.

This lack of rich, novel memories makes it feel like time has flown by when we look back in the same way that Gmail’s nested emails can make your inbox appear less full.

Or Is It?

While what I’m about to talk about is hardly as memorable as riding a bike on your own for the first time, it is memorable none the less.

At least the first time it happens.

My husband and I were sitting with one of our couple friends (if you’re in a relationship, you know how valuable those people are. When both of you find people you both like, it can feel like the friendship lottery.) at our favorite wine bar the other night.

She regaled us with a story of how a twenty-something girl hit on her man in front of her. The “young thang” tried to talk him into giving her his phone number because she “had a picture of them that was really cute.”

My friend is a beautiful woman, who while in her 50s, is often mistaken for someone in her 30s.

But this “little girl” was still a decade younger than that (at least).

We rolled our eyes at the audacity of the young girl, while our guys were still wondering what the big deal was about some kind stranger wanting to share a good picture.

There’s something sobering in aging as a woman.

You get backhanded compliments like, “You look great for your age.”

Why can’t we just look great?

There are women waiting in the wings, trying to lure bored husbands away like it’s a spectator sport.

But what they don’t realize is that five minutes ago, WE were those women. Okay, maybe we weren’t luring older men to the Heartbreak Hotel, but we were the ones turning heads, getting the extra scoop of ice cream because we smiled at the guy behind the counter and held eye contact just a little longer than is socially acceptable.

It all goes so quickly.

And most of us don’t appreciate when we’re in it. When we’re in the “prime” society has assigned us, we still think we need to lose weight, or grow into our nose, or fake a tan.

We tell ourselves that we’d be prettier if our hair was longer, blonder, or straighter.

We don’t appreciate who we are because we haven’t truly discovered it yet.

Yes, life goes quickly. But it’s designed to.

If it didn’t, we might forget that we were once that girl who had the power to turn heads with a giggle or a hair toss.

And we could be that again.

But would we want to?