Tempus Fugit, and I have no idea where it went. Once upon a time I was less aware of time. Or at least its passing. You know, back when it barely moved. If you're thirty something or older, you remember the days when a semester felt like an eon. When summer vacation was measured in geologic time. Damn, those were good times. Because time was good to us. Time was on our side.

Time is supposed to be a constant, but we can cross out that notion with a nice heavy ball point pen (red, of course). Plato said time is the motion of the cosmos. Aristotle said Nah, it's not motion, it's the measure of motion. Much later, Immanuel Kant offered something interesting: Our minds perceive space as having Euclidian geometry, and time as an infinite mathematical line. Almost every one of our great philosophers had their own theory or method of explaining time. The one explanation that feels the most true to my rational brain and info-needy heart comes from Albert Einstein:

Time as we know it—and time as we measure it with our calendars and clocks, is a human invention. Therefore, we can conclude that it's imperfect. It can't be a true constant.

I think this is a satisfactory explanation for the phenomenon of what I'll call proportional time variance. In fact, let's call it PTV so that it sounds cool. PTV is responsible for that pit in your gut when you realize that those memories from college that feel close enough to reach out and touch are more than a decade away. PTV is the reason you have a hard time believing that your coffee is already cold. It's why your stomach is already barking for lunch but you just got started. It's why you see the sun going down a few moments after reading the mail. It programs us to say things like "Where did the day go?", or "No way it's already six o'clock. Are you kidding me?" It's also why your dearest memories feel like they're closer to you than they are.

More specifically, PTV is that very real perception that time burns more quickly the older we get. As the proportion of our lived lives increases relative to the unlived, unknown future...time seems to, well, fly. Meanwhile, the instruments we use to measure time tell us that a day or week or year in 1986 spanned the same amount of time as it does today.

So, do we trust our flawed perceptions, or our flawed instruments? Like you, I know the answer but I don't. As soon as you choose one over the other, you doubt yourself. You quickly conceive an argument that at least temporarily overrides your conclusion.

Einstein's genius was beautiful because his language was beautiful, and truth is beauty and beauty is truth. His ideas have stood the test of time, and they feel right. They feel like truth. They appeal to the rational mind as well as the aesthetic mind. Time took Einstein. It'll take you, too. And me.

There has to be another way.