There are some phrases you'll hear from old & older people - that I hear from my 86 year old mother, for example - among which are versions of these: "Life is short." "It all happened so fast." "It was all over in the blink of an eye." I understand why they say this. I sympathize, but don't entirely feel the same way.
Perhaps what is missing is a lack of perspective. Imagine listening to a fourteen-year-old tell a story, maybe a simple tale of excitedly seeing a old friend at an unusual place. The teenager will tell the story - even if she's telling it well - with a lot of unnecessary details. Superfluous description. Possibly whole remembered snippets of conversation. & most assuredly the story will lack any background, asides describing shared experiences between the friends, even historical or social context. At fourteen, you haven't lived a great deal of life.
The same story told by a forty-four-year-old would be a completely different affair. Indeed, the meeting would be mostly a pretext to discuss what had transpired in life between their last meeting - if it could be recalled - & the circumstances that brought them to the unusual place. Dialogue wouldn't be recounted - a summary of topics discussed would be more the order of the day. Not to disrespect the narrative skills of your average high school freshman, but this older person's story would be much, much more fleshed-out. & it would probably be a better story.
The obvious difference between the two storytellers is, well, thirty years. Somewhere along the line, I believe, our brain learns ways to keep us from going crazy from years of memories. We simply can't store the minutiae we experience every day, so our memories are bundled into stories, stories that we often forget, stories that we tell ourselves to give ourselves definition. We learn to distill time as a way, perhaps, to keep ourselves sane.
Our perception of time is affected by our passage through time. Days that are much the same blend into one another. It takes a kind of will - & it's not entirely pleasant - to try to remember the tedium one slogs through during a regular twenty-four-hour period. As I often tell my mother, "It seems like time has sped right by because you're not thinking about the long, boring, uninteresting moments you've spent, which may have been the majority of your life."
That's a big difference (among many) between my mother & me. I can recall some moments where the nothing in my life threatened to smother me. Long hours in a room reading as the light dimmed, or lonely times waiting, staring at a wall & unable to make a positive move. I remember vividly long drives where a sign might say "next town 52 miles" & I felt an hour had passed before the subsequent sign read, "next town 50 miles." I have lived forty-seven years & it hardly ever feels to me like it's gone by too fast. In fact, this past year, with its disappointments, its deaths, its seasons acting out like spoiled children, has felt like two years to me, even possibly three.
This is not something I'll immediately share with my wife, who's having a birthday tomorrow, & whose birthday I will celebrate on tomorrow's show. I've done it eleven times before, a birthday show for her, & have not repeated - & will not repeat - a single birthday recording. (I have played - & will play - cover versions should they be good.) It's getting more difficult as the years go by, & maybe I will eventually recycle the shows. But not tomorrow!
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