When I was younger, December felt like it lasted forever. The excitement would start weeks before Christmas, and even after the celebrations, there always seemed to be enough time left to enjoy the holidays.
Now, one minute it’s January, and the next thing I know, people are already talking about Christmas again. What exactly happened to all those days in between?
I sometimes wonder if this is what growing up feels like. As children, we could spend an entire afternoon playing outside and still feel like we had the whole day ahead of us. School holidays seemed endless. Birthdays took forever to arrive, and waiting for a special occasion was practically an event of its own.
These days, I can barely keep track of the months.
Part of the explanation may be that childhood is full of firsts. Your first day at a new school, your first sleepover, your first trip somewhere exciting. There is so much to discover that those experiences can leave strong memories. As we grow older, our routines become more familiar, and days can begin to blend into one another.
Think about it. If you spend most of your days following the same routine, you might look back at the past month and struggle to remember what made one week different from another. But a month filled with new experiences can feel much longer in retrospect.
Of course, the calendar hasn’t changed. A day still has 24 hours, whether you’re eight or eighty.
Perhaps the strange part isn’t that time is moving faster. It’s that we’re becoming more aware of how much of it has already passed.
And somehow, January was just yesterday.
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