The chill of fall got me thinking about the variability of time. After seventy-two years, seasons still take me by surprise. I know that cool follows warmth, decay generation, yet blink at its occurrence. I am older – but what does that mean? What has happened to the persons I’ve known no longer here?

Time is a unit of measurement – a minute a minute, a day a day, a year a year – same for all – but that’s not how we experience it. Like taffy, time can stretch or be pressed into a ball. As we age, it passes faster – we feel it vanishing like water into sand – yet when we were young it lingered, sometimes interminably: how come?

I jot three factors to account for the variability of time: proportionality, novelty, urgency. Are there others? No doubt. To pin time in words is to wrestle Proteus. “Time is but the stream I go fishing in,” said Thoreau.

The older we get, the shorter each instant in proportion. A year when I was seven was fifteen percent of my total; now it’s a tenth that. Scarcity creates value. Young, our unlived years stretch like the ocean, our lived years few. Old, this is reversed. My remaining years are – who knows – and of those, too many will pass awaiting docs. I cling to them like flotsam, not to drown.

Novelty slows the clock. Remember your first day in a new school? Impressions flood through widened eyes. Who are these people? How will I be? Time crammed full trudges slowly, lugging a great weight.

These days, in Jane’s and my life, little new occurs. We have seen the sunrise and the moon and much of Netflix (though never all). The headlines are the same, only worse. I write new words – I hope! – but this missive is nearly – can it be? –  my four thousandth, each day, like the tick of a clock. We disintegrate – that is a change – but typically at a rate too slow to notice if we cared to (which we don’t).

Urgency likewise stretches hours. Will that big day ever arrive? The big day of a final exam or job interview or loved one’s response or baby’s birthday! How we waited – on pins and needles – “Hurry!” we urged the clock, which ignored us. Fewer life-changing events stalk us now, except diagnoses, which we’d as soon skip.

“What then is time?” mused Saint Augustine. “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain to him who asks, I do not know.” Time threatens some, consoles others. Since age sixteen, when my dad died, time has been ever on my mind. I too would die at forty-six, then I didn’t – now what? With no path to follow, I made my own and began to live. I am still in a terrible hurry – but toward what, I couldn’t say: something worthy. I resent the theft of time by helpdesks and bores.

I used to wrestle time, rail at it. These days it carries me like a feather on a stream. I surrender – what use fussing? – yet the sudden chill of fall still startles. I spend each moment charily, so few remain, but when all are spent, that will be that, I am not afraid. I hold with George Herbert, more and more a bosom chum: “Do not wait; the time will never be ‘just right.’ Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.” And with Emily Dickinson: “Forever is composed of nows.”