Time can go by so fast when we’re trying to get a lot of things done, especially when we’re on a time crunch. It’s like every minute we think that has past was actually five minutes in real time. And when time is up, it’s like that last hour or two was a blur–fractions of moments and events that, when added up, only come out to a few minutes.
When I say to myself, “Where did the time go?” it’s usually toward the end of the day. At the end of the day, we can rest, reflect on what transpired from morning till evening. It all seems episodic, like clips from a movie trailer in which we remember the highlights, but don’t actually remember being at those specific scenes. The time flew by so fast that we thought we had blinked and missed something, but the reality is that our experience of time is more like a daydream than a detailed account on a ledger or in a book.
Each day, time marches forward, never backwards. We can’t rewind it and correct our mistakes, nor can we rewind it to analyze how we experienced the past. All we have are memories of it, but even they are just interpretations based on our mode of perception at each and every moment.
That saying, “Where did the time go?” is paradoxical, since we know where it went: it goes forward–forward in the sense of transitioning from the present to the future. But what we mean when we ask ourselves that is how did we lose track of time, why did we spend so much of it trying to get things done, trying to do everything at once, when all we wanted was a break?
Fallton Havenstonne 