The Differential Experience of Time

On the one hand, three weeks in North Carolina seems interminable. It is longer than I have been away from home in five years, and only the second time in 32 years of marriage I have been gone that long.. On the other hand, it seems to have sped by at a reckless rate. I can almost feel the whiplash. Why does 45 minutes on the stationary bike seem like forever, but 45 minutes down the Google hole passes in a flash? Why, back when I programmed computers, was I perennially surprised to find I had spent 4, 8 or 12 hours in heads down debugging?  It makes me wonder if a two-week vacation (we took our first in almost a decade last Christmas) is worth it, if it speeds by before it can be savored.

This is a different differential experience of time than the one that I have noted before (and of course, it isn't an original observation) that time passes more swiftly as we get older. I am fond of the explanation that, when you are ten, a month seems like six months, but when you are 60 six months seem like a month. That is, as we grow older, a fixed amount of time is a smaller percentage of our life.  This differential I understand. The other one, I have no good explanation for. Oh, I've read stuff about "fugue states," and maybe that's part of it for the programming or Google distractions.  But I don't think it explains everything. Clearly, time is fungible, slippery, ephemeral., a human construct, a trick our minds play on us, "God's way of making sure everything doesn't happen at once."

Makes me want to spend more time in the moment; isn't this the only moment we will ever have?