Experienced Time

For his birthday, an astrophysicist of my acquaintance decided to calculate how much experienced time he had lived thus far (because of course he would).  Because when you're, say, 3, the interval between one year and the next is virtually unfathomable--it's a solid third of your life, right?  A birthday is of course a huge deal at that age.  Then by the time you're 5, a year has shortened to only a fifth of your life, and when you're 10 that's only tenth, and so forth.  By his calculations, by the time you are 25, even if you eventually make it to 80 or even 90, you have already experienced the majority of your life.  Not lived it mind you, but temporally experienced it.

Suddenly it makes a lot more sense why High School movies are so popular even among adults, or why "Young Adult" is read so much by actual adults, or why so many of us are so nostalgic for the decades of our teens--it's certainly not because those were the best years of our lives, but because, experientially, those were the majority of our lives on this Earth!

On a more personal level, his calculations have suddenly made me brood a little more on my teens, which I have not done in years.  For usually, when I reflect on my life, I usually begin with my mission to Puerto Rico, and then barrel down through my college years in Idaho and Utah and the Midwest, my jobs in China and Mexico, my trips across Europe and etc.  Like most folks, I wisely ignore the embarrassment of my teens and mostly put it out of my mind.

But perhaps that's a mistake, maybe if my youth is experientially the majority of my life, then I shouldn't be quite so swift to discount them as a big, long mistake.  Moreover, in my experience as a teacher, late-teens are merely inexperienced, not unintelligent; they are ignorant, not naive.  They do in fact see through our adult hypocrisies quite easily; and if they can't quite put their finger or explain why something is wrong, they can still at least tell that something is wrong.  Nathaniel Hawthorne once said something to the effect that an artist spends most his adult life confirming the things he believed as a youth, and maybe he wasn't being sarcastic when he said that; maybe everything we thought was right and wrong while young will still turn out to be right in the end after all.