Well, it’s that time of year again, when we turn over the last page of the calendar—those of us who still use paper calendars, that is—and shake our heads as we wonder out loud: “Where did the year go?”

Even though Christmas sales and decorations now start showing up around July, the Christmas season still unofficially starts on the day after Thanksgiving. And since Thanksgiving this year was November 28, the last date it’s possible to be, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is crunched even more, making time feel like it’s flying by faster than ever.

Time is a constant, however, and whether it seems to be going quickly or slowly is a matter of perception. I love some of the pearls of wisdom—serious or silly—that speak to this. One of my favorites states that the actual amount of time a minute lasts depends on which side of the bathroom door you’re on. Then there’s the time management principle that says we overestimate the amount of time it will take to do something we don’t want to do, and underestimate the amount of time we spend on things we do want to do. I have to confess, I’m guilty of both. And I’ll bet I’m not the only person who can identify with the saying, “The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get.” That’s not technically about how time seems to speed up or slow down, but it’s somewhat related, and it always makes me smile.

I remember a scene from a long-ago TV show in which a woman set up a blind date for a co-worker, and was asking her the next morning how it went. “If I had only a month to live, I’d marry him in a heartbeat,” she responded. The woman who set up the date was excited to hear it, until her friend added, “because every day with him would feel like a year.”

What we can take from all this is that time drags during difficult, unpleasant, and boring events and experiences, and races during easy, exciting, and enjoyable ones. If that’s the case, we should be happy when the year seems to have flown by. It means it’s been a good year.

That’s just my theory, of course, but as further evidence, we can look at the flip side. When anyone has a year filled with setbacks and sorrows—accidents, illnesses, legal or financial problems, and maybe a relationship that went sour, you’ll often hear them, in late December,  saying things like, “Thank God this year is finally over!” Or, “I couldn’t wait for this year to end.”

With that in mind, I hope you’ll join me in wondering where the year went—and enjoying all the memories that went along with it.

December 3, 2024
©Betty Liedtke, 2024

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