Flow

Time has begun to move more quickly.

In genuinely has. It's not like one of those situations on a workday afternoon when someone (usually me) says "Man, hasn't today gone slowly?". As though my subjective experience of time will be shared by the person I'm talking to. If we do agree about the speed of the day, it's only coincidence.

It's pretty much always the slow days I remark on. Colleagues sometimes say to me "Wow, is that really the time? Today has just flown by!". And I agree out of politeness, because for me it has been a crawl through zero-g treacle. You may have been aboard the flying day, but I was left behind, inhaling the exhaust fumes.

This isn't like one of those things. Time actually is moving more quickly.

I can prove it.

Yesterday, I got into the shower. Physically. (I metaphorically got into showers in the late 90s; the fad having been brought to prominence by Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake. I've been a fan ever since.)

Just as I turned the water on, I realised that it had only seemed like seconds since I'd last had a shower. It hadn't - it had been a whole day. But my previous shower seemed so recent that I became confused and accidentally swallowed a soap.

Had any time passed between the two showers? Had I experienced the intervening day's worth of activity? I wasn't sure. I wasn't aware of anything being amiss during the day, but that shower made me think I'd been in suspended animation.

Could my mind be playing tricks on me? Or could I be playing tricks on my mind?

How can one differentiate between real experience and memory? Had my consciousness been static for 23 hours and 40 minutes (give or take)? Was my consciousness only awakened by a stream of hot running water?

But it's not just the shower. Weekends are coming faster. It's Friday today. But it was Monday, like, yesterday. I'm sure of it. I haven't lived for a whole week. Before I know it, it will be Monday again. Time is speeding up. I'm being buffeted on its [specific rafting terminology].

It's already August. August 2012. About three weeks ago, it was 2011. Last year, it was four years ago. Five years ago was the whole Bay of Pigs brouhaha.

At first, I thought it must be subjective. I thought it was like the "Man, hasn't today gone slowly?" scenario. After all, wouldn't other people have noticed?

A watched pot does boil. I thought I'd just been watching my pot too closely, and subsequently underestimating the water temperature.

But I found definitive proof.

It's been ages since we last filled up a bin bag. It used to happen more often. But now it is happening less often.

Why? Because time is moving more quickly. There's less time to use things and create waste. There's not as much garbage time as there used to be. It's the only explanation.

(Unless our recycling regiment has improved - those items are stored in a plastic box and dealt with on a different schedule. That's another explanation.)

So, time is moving more quickly. It will be the end of the world soon. The flow of time is increasing exponentially. Quick! Someone build a dam!

I'm going to alert the authorities by tweeting a link to this blog and hoping one of them (the authorities) follows me. The chances are slim, but dot dot dot.

Actually, now that I think about it, I'm probably just getting old. I'm on the downward slope, and things move more quickly here.

When you're a child, a week is a year. When you're a teenager, a week is six months. When you're thirty, a year is a week. When you're fifty, they've brought in some new metric/decimal year system and you find the whole thing confusing.

When you're old, you're weak for a year. When you're dead, you can't see your watch calendar, because your family ignored your EXPLICIT INSTRUCTIONS to put a night-light in your coffin.

It reminds me of that song about the passing of time. I forget which one, but I think it used a leaf metaphor.

I started writing this blog post a second ago. I didn't have time for a proofread.