Everyone comments on time moving so fast. The older you get, the faster it goes. Now that I have a child, everyone tells me that before I know it, they’ll be graduating high school and I won’t know what hit me.
Right now, I don’t think I’m too worried about that. Because for me, times moves pretty darn slow. I don’t have any fancy time machine — I just work for an agency.
For the record, this isn’t about slamming management (which I’m part of) or making some errant jab at the way things are done. It’s more about Einstein’s theory of relativity.
I know. You’ve got that blank stare. What the hell am I talking about? Since when does working at an agency have anything to do with physics? It doesn’t (mostly), but the theory of relativity is what’s important here.
According to the theory, the observation of time is different for two different people in different states of motion. For example, one person on the Earth and one person travelling in a spaceship moving close to the speed of light. For each individual person, time moves at the same rate. But for the person on Earth, they would observe time moving more slowly for the person in the spaceship.
See where I’m going with this? I’m in that spaceship. The U.S.S. Critical Mass. And she’s got the Enterprise beaten hands-down. We move fast. Really fast. Sometimes it’s really hard to notice, because for us — time moves the same inside the walls. It’s only when others look in that it makes you really notice.
I’m only able to change my perspectively slightly because I’m actually pausing to look in. I have to — I’m a family man now, and I need to make sure I’ve got my feet rooted in the right places. So my perspective — my relativity — is changing slightly. Not a bad thing, just different.
On the bright side, it means that I feel like I’m doing a lot, too. I don’t feel like I’m sitting around, wasting a life. On the down side … I wonder if the adage of the candle burning twice as bright burns only half as long is really true.
