Theoretically, how much would you pay to have time go slower for you?

Ha, oh millions.  I really would.  Who wouldn’t?  Okay, well what busy adult wouldn’t?  It reminds me of this article I once read in the New Yorker…you know how kids can’t sit still and they fidget and whine about an hour taking f o r e v e r. . . there is a thought about time that explains why every year seems to pass by faster and faster: If you look at one year as a fraction of your life, then the older you get, each year the denominator gets bigger.  Thus, the fraction gets smaller; meaning that year is a smaller length of your relative experience of time.  So truly, time goes by faster as we age.  For example, a toddler feels like waiting for school to end is eternity because a year is 1/4^th of his life. So according to his mom’s age, it’s as if one year is nine years.  One hour in waiting room is nine hours, one more day until Disneyland is nine days!  It makes so much sense.  And most people I know would say I would LOVE to have time work out that way for me.  A weekend becomes a week and lunch breaks last all day.   So maybe the question is not so much changing time, but our perception of it.  Or just becoming kids again. Although to be honest, I wouldn’t want to be a kid again.  I’d take an automatic coffee maker and a fresh martini over toys any day.  When I was growing up, my parent’s always said I was too serious.  I didn’t really like playing with other kids on the playground, I would have rather sat on the park bench and talked about books or what I wanted to be when I grew up.  At birthday parties I had an easier time talking with the moms than their children my age.  And it drove my brother and sister wild that I liked to clean my room.  At that point in my life, I couldn’t wait to be an adult, to complain about not having enough time, to say things like Let’s do lunch and I’ll look at my calendar and see if I can fit it in.  And years later, here I am, just as I had hoped and dreamed.  It is one of my biggest strengths- to be able to measure time.  Where others are late or waste the day, I can tell you:  Lunch can be as quick as 14 minutes if you eat something that doesn’t require a spoon, which leaves 36 minutes to run some errands.  Things like this mean I am terrific at quantifying my day- breaking it into squares of minutes and hours and then re-packing it in like tetris blocks stacked solid.  Maybe that’s what this all really comes down to: I always would have rather played tetris than let’s-pretend-to-be-princesses.   Funny, I haven’t thought of my younger self in a long time.  It’s nice to know I gave myself what I wanted.  And you know, I wouldn’t trade it.  I see all those girls I knew; the ones who played dolls and house now really do have babies and make dinner all day.  The ones who dreamed of princes and heart-throb boyfriends do spend all their time gushing and blushing about how beautiful love is, ignoring the idea that there could be anything else in the world besides one person.  No wonder they say “What a small world!”

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