By Stella A. Estremera
Spider’s Web

NEW Years always bring in exclamations from friends and kin how fast years go by. And then the ubiquitous attachment to such comment, "unlike before".

How time flies, especially during the first or last month of the year is a hackneyed conversation-starter much like the weather, but like weather, it still generates conversation.

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And so I'm here, trying to ponder on why time flies "unlike before", while tinkering with my calculator. Ooops, sorry, that's an idiosyncrasy that came with my first scientific calculator eons ago, I tinker with a calculator when I try to make sense of things. Not that I'm a math wiz or what, I've never been. I'm just fascinated by numbers and notes and letters and codes and everything that when put together makes sense but are nothing but a senseless blob when taken individually. I'm even more fascinated by all the stuff a scientific calculator can calculate, it's like magic. *Grin!*

My calculator says, one year in a two-year-old's life is half of his life. One year in a 40-year-old's like is 0.025 of his life. That in itself should explains why time flies. Time is a constant, it's our perception of it that is relative.

As a kid we looked forward to recess, nothing else, and so it seemed like recess was such a long time away. Now, we look forward to a car, a house and lot, our 15 days' wage and make annual plans with daily monitoring graphs, and so time just rushes by, punctuated only by the end of one of several goals; that because there are several others waiting, is just as quickly forgotten.

While we may not be aware of how our body keeps time, our brain knows. And thus today, we rush through our work in the morning only to look up in surprise because it's already lunch time and we almost forgot lunch because we're still half a million peso short of a dream car while earning just over P400 a day or even less.

Imagine: If we look forward to buying a car and we need P500,000 more while earning P400 a day (let's just assume that every day is paid, never mind the real non-working days so that we don't muddle things up), that will be 1,250 days. Since you want that car darn so much, your mind will be focused on that 1,250 days for your car, but you will only remember your car and the day you bought it. The 1,250 days can very well be forgotten afterwards, or will pass unnoticed as you save up for your half-a-million more.

When we were kids, recess time at 9:30 a.m. from the 7:30 a.m. start of classes seemed like a long, long way off. The ring of the bell is so much anticipated, we rush out, despite our teacher's constant reminder not to run and to fix our chairs first.

Today, we sit back, stretch, and do everything else, except run because there's still 1,249 days to go before we get that car anyway. In between, everything's drab. No car, no life.

I tinker again and think in hours. One year is 8,765 hours. Forty years is a little over 350,600 hours (Let's just not in absolute numbers and not think of leap years so I don't clutter things up). Now if we're talking of the friskiest time in our life, that would be when we were in first grade, seven years old, or around 61,400 hours old. Two hours to a 350,600 hours old person is five zeroes from the decimal point. To a 61,400 hours old, its four zeroes. A tenth power more. Oh gee.

Outside, I watch children rushing home from school in what can be a tenth power more speed than when I saw them walking to school earlier in the morning. Us adults, we crawl both ways. Anticipation of going home is already as jaded as the anticipation of going to work. And so we look with bleary eyes when yet another year draws to an end, asking, where did it all go? (Did you check on your bleary eyes and what it has been missing all along? For all you know, that's what has been making all those years slip by unnoticed).

Maybe we just have to skip along with time, enjoy every tick, and rush to whatever it is that we look forward to in tenth power time, and when everything else fails, then tinker with your calculators as well and be fascinated with what it can reveal. Yes, please make that a scientific calculator, it's magical... (And I don't have, and am not saving up, for a car.) *Grin!*

saestremera@yahoo.com