Well, it’s Friday.  Again.  And while I am always pleased to see Friday come around (be it Friday the 13th or no) I am not always quite so sure how it got here.  This week was a case in point—I am quite certain the last time I looked up it was actually only Tuesday . . .

We have just completed our first week of Term 4 here at the college.  I did manage to have a few days break away from the office between last term and this.  It wasn’t a long break because although we had no classes running there was still plenty of work to be done but I booked three days leave and with the following weekend and a public holiday thrown in I had a lovely six day respite from students, databases and ringing phones.  The girls and I went for long walks, dug holes in the garden, read books and watched old movies.  Bliss.  Alas, that time passed all too quickly (as it usually does) and I now find myself back in the office and knee deep in paper again.

It is an oft-observed phenomenon that time seemed to pass so much more slowly when we were younger.  Each day we had to spend indoors in the classroom seemed interminable as the hours dragged on (and on and on . . . ), the school terms between holidays were excruciatingly drawn out and long-awaited birthdays never seemed to come around often enough.

But then, on the plus side, summer holidays when you finally got to them, stretched out in an endless stream of long hot days spent outside lazing under a shady tree, or boating, or swimming, or at the beach eating ice-lolls and watermelon and (in my case) getting horrific sunburn, occasional heatstroke and sand stuck in places it was never meant to reach . . .

My how things have changed.  Nowadays, for me at least, it seems that Christmas and Easter may as well be the same festivity for the space we get between them, holidays are still fun but are over in the blink of an eye—and, well, don’t even get me started on how often those birthdays come around!

If you actually stop and think about it, time is a really weird thing and I am not the only one who has pondered as to why the passage of time seems to pass so differently at various stages of our lives.

One theory is that each unit of time that you live through is only a small portion of your total experience, so for a one year old child, one year is, literally, a lifetime. To a ten year old, a year is one tenth of their total experience, and so their ‘clock’ has only just begun to move.  For those who are 70, 80 or 90, one year is nearer to 1% of their total life experience and so the shorter time that is left races ahead and the past stretches out far behind.

Perhaps it has more to do with anticipation and retrospection but, anyway, take it from me—reading up on the psychological, philosophical and physical theories about time can just about do your head in!

So I have decided that I like the Occam’s razor principle the best (the simplest explanation is usually the correct one) and in that vein I reckon Albert Einstein nailed it when he said, ‘The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen all at once.’

Now that’s a theory I can get my head around . . .