EXPONENTIAL PERCEPTION

We had a little bit of a sad anniversary the other day, in that we were marking six years having gone by since a much-loved member of our little family passed away, and it got me thinking all over again about our exponential perception of time passing.

After all, at this point in my life, it’s only possible for me to have been acquainted with that particular person since a maximum of just over a dozen years ago, and yet the six years in which I did know her seemed to last far longer in my mind that the six that have now gone by since we lost her.

But then this always seems to have been the case.

On paper, the dates tell me that my grandfather died only five years before my father did, but those two funerals seem decades apart to me, and yet both of those events are now more than a quarter of a century ago, but sometimes it seems like it was only yesterday.

Nowadays, for me at least, the decades seem to fly by in much the same way as the months used to. The years pass by now almost exponentially. Can it really already be three years since Egypt…? Why do the millennium night fireworks seem as if they were only last week…? How have I managed to not see some people for more than a decade or two, so that in my mind they’re all still in their twenties…? How can a full five percent of my time on this earth so far have passed since I attended a party marking the passing of a company I once worked at a third of a lifetime ago…?

I blame living from paycheque to paycheque of course. Bang! Bang! Bang! Twelve of them and another Christmas has come around…

A weekend can pass in the blink of an eye if you don’t fill it up adequately, and sometimes it’s still somehow become Sunday evening before you can quite get used to the fact that it’s even become the weekend at all…

Because I enjoy the world of film and television far more than is probably good for me, and can count the number of precious years wasted on idly sitting and watching a screen as the world slipped by, it is always the dates of films that can most surprise me.

As the Academy Awards come around again, I find it hard to believe that it is now 21 years since “The Silence of the Lambs” swept the board in 1992 ceremony, and yet it still feels rather contemporary to me.

When I was young, twenty year-old films looked like bad sci-fi, and all the backdrops looked like paintings. It’s almost as if the world has kind of ground to a halt in some ways, with only the lack of any personal electronic devices, the occasional now “classic” vehicle, and the occasional smoker to let us know that things are not what they were.

But then it still throws me that “Star Trek – The Motion Picture” was made ten years after that “ancient” TV show had finished, but that they’ve now been making those films for thirty-four years, or that the first year of “Star Trek – The Next Generation” was made when I was just finishing college, again more than a quarter of a century ago…

But then, how can it also be that long since Roger Moore hung up his Walther…?

When I was a boy, reading about them in my “Target” Books, the idea of any “Doctor Who” from the era of black and white television seemed like relics from a long-lost time, and yet, when I was first reading those books, Patrick Troughton had only faded away a mere three years before, and now it’s more than thirty since Tom Baker’s Doctor fell off that radio telescope and sat up looking like Peter Davison…

It’s all about time, you see…?

Time, and our perception of it…

Perhaps if I hadn’t spent so much of it sitting in front of the TV but had filled mine up with some proper living, maybe it wouldn’t have all managed to slip away from me whilst I wasn’t looking…?