I was thinking today about how time is a very strange, funny, atypical, and sometimes irrelevant part of life. There are times, for lack of a better word, when time seems to go by faster than a whisper, but sometimes time stands still for long and magnanimous moments, as if the clock on the wall is stopped.

I was thinking about the times when time seems to go by so quickly. Moments in your life, where time seems to evade the 24 hour schedule, and just flies by as if there is no regard for speed. Some of these moments, where your mind is completely and exclusively focused and immersed on an object, a feeling, a sound. It is these times that life is so strange to me. How can the 60 minute television show, seem like I just turned it on, how can the 90 minute conversation with someone you haven’t talked to in forever go by so quickly; and how can your childhood go by so effortlessly, that before you know it, you are supposed to be more than what you think you have become.

For the latter, I wonder how these moments are sometimes so magnified that they take so long to partake, it can feel like an eternity between moments of clarity? How can that uncomfortable moment seem to last so long you could have written the american novel between the moment it started and the second it ended. You seem to be so transfixed on something that time has slowed down to a bitter, hasty and unforeseen stop, so abrupt you could have lost a year of your life and not known it.

Could it be the anticipation of these events is what speeds and slows it? In each instance, you are fixated on what will happen next. Although Ben Franklin said, “You may delay, but time will not,” I wonder if you can consciously stop this from happening, to throw yourself at the will of yourself, and speed up time, and slow down time as you see fit, not necessarily time, but your perception and cognizance of the time that is passing you by.

If anyone actually reads this, please indulge me as to any thoughts you have, opinions on the subject, or just random stories of time slowing down, or speeding up.