Remember when you were a kid and it seemed to take forever for anything to get here? Back then a year was so much longer especially when you were waiting for something special like your birthday or Christmas. The only thing that seemed to fly by was summer vacation. Heck, it had barely gotten started before it was time to go back to school. That just wasn't fair. It took at least a zillion years to finally be old enough to ride around the block with the other kids on your bike or walk to the shopping center with your friends to see a movie. Not to mention the time it took to reach driving age....had to be at least one lifetime if not longer!
Now I find myself wondering where all the time went. Just the other day I was shopping for a birthday present and was stopped dead in my tracks by a Christmas display! Staring open-mouthed at the Santas and wreaths, I couldn't help but exclaim out loud "No...it can't be that close!". Taking a deep breath I slowly realized that, yes Virignia, Santa Claus was coming in just a couple of months. Surely it had just been a short while ago that I had finally gotten all the decorations stowed away. And wasn't it just a few weeks ago that I got out the summer clothes? Double-checking the calendar when I got home only proved the quick passage of months since last Christmas. Where did all the time go?? I mean I'm not ready to give up warm air and sunshine for cold and snow. And the thought of shopping for Christmas presents hadn't even begun to creep into my head yet.
Thinking back to the slow passage of time when I was younger, I'm beginning to think that someone had to have pushed the fast forward button by mistake when I wasn't paying attention. There's still 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year, but don't blink or you'll miss at least half of them. Granted weekends seem so much shorter now and vacations zoom by at twice the speed of light but that's just because we don't look forward to going back to work any more than we looked forward to going back to school as kids.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could adjust the speed of time to suit ourselves? We could speed up the work week to a New York minute and slow down our free time to the pace of a political debate. It would be heaven to be able to race through the wait at the doctor's office and to stroll leisurely through a good novel. Just think how quickly all the little things that annoy us could be over.....an hour's commute would flash by so road rage would be non-existant, you'd never feel a thing in the dentist's chair in the mili-second you'd be sitting there and all those red lights that never seem to change would be twinkling like Christmas lights! Christmas...yikes....it'll be here before I know it. Oh well, back to reality.