We hear it all the time, we say it all the time…’I’ve just been so busy!’ or ‘Time is passing by faster now more than ever!’.

I read a book about neurological studies that discussed how time seems to go faster as we age because everything and all the events around us are relative. When we are young, we have few memories. As a result, time between events seems to be ‘longer’ only because there has been nothing else (yet) to fill the memory void.

The older we get, the more experiences we have and therefore the time between events becomes condensed. We are now living more experiences in a shorter period of time and therefore we have more memories.

Parallel this concept similar to the difference between a liquid solution, both diluted and saturated. Add salt to a glass of water and at first, the distance between salt molecules is great and the salt easily dissolves. If we were to experience ourselves at the molecular level, swimming in such a solution, we would need to swim an ‘x’ distance from one salt molecule to another. Keep adding salt into the water and we find ourselves not needing to swim as far to get to the next molecule (x/2, x/3, x/4, x/8, etc.) because the water solution becomes more densely populated with the addition of more salt molecules.

Certainly not to trivialize our thoughts and life experiences to salt water solution but the resulting phenomenon is the same. Time seems to pass us by at a faster rate because we have experienced more and more of life within our lifespan.

Each and every day, we are at the leading edge of our ‘end of life’. What we experience and have lived is packed in somewhere behind us, in memories. We have more and more life experience within our finite time-to-date…and our life experiences continue to grow as we age. Time between events shortens and we therefore experience time as passing faster.

Our busy lives are busy. This is what we do. We fill our lives with events of the day. We fill our lives with the people we see, talk to, and interact with. We fill our lives with work, play, hobby, and little rest. We are consumers of the ‘free time’ that we have. We do it to ourselves. We are the ones who fill our time with events and experiences.

That is what life is all about Charlie Brown.

If this sounds negative, it’s really not. Let’s look at this relative time phenomenon in a positive light. If our lives were unfulfilled and we had few memories to recall upon, our ‘time’ would seem to be unending and slow moving. I don’t think anybody would like that scenario. Certainly I would not.

Yes, time does seem to pass by at an exponential rate year after year. But that is how it is supposed to be because we have lived life. Balance all of life’s busyness with down-time so that there is opportunity to appreciate all of that which make up the passage of time. Keep filling your brain with experiences, events, and memories. Our memories are what make and keep us…us.