“The hurrier I go the behinder I get.” Somewhere I’ve heard those words before and they seem to describe me sometimes. But how can that be? I seldom get in a hurry. I learned long ago that hurrying often leads to mistakes that make me get really behinder. My problem must be deeper than this. But what could account for my behinder problem?

Perhaps in my younger days things seemed to go in a normal way and I didn’t notice getting behind where I should be. Maybe it was only later that I noticed I was getting behind at all. Gradual changes often go unnoticed for a long time. Then one day something takes longer than normal to finish. I think nothing of it until it happens again and again. In physics class I thought I learned that time is a constant quantity until a moving body nears the speed of light. 

Also I notice that people are rushing around: to get to work, to spend their money shopping, and hurrying to do all things that need to be done. Hurrying through life is not limited to scurrying feet, but to tongues as well. I once was able to understand most talk I heard in English, but alas that is no longer true. Many people talk so fast that it is tiresome to listen to them for long before attention drifts off to another subject.

Try listening to radio advertisements and notice that most of them put as many words as possible into their time slot, be it understandable or not. Some give a phone number not once but maybe five times, each time at a rapid rate. If they wanted me to remember the number, the voice would have spoken the number slower and after a reasonable pause repeated it just once.

Really ridiculous ads are those where the voice races through the spiel to complete a glowing message only to have a “fine print” voice continue with what can only be assumed to modify the original message, spoken at a breakneck speed that even the speaking voice could likely not understand. Such ads are not welcome fare for my unhurried brain.

So what does all this speediness mean? Do people need to move faster than they did when I was young? Is there much more that has to be done than previously? Haven’t the multitudes of labor-saving devices made things easier so that folks can slow down and enjoy the gain in leisure time? Evidently not. Perhaps it only opened the way for more necessary things to exist.

Suppose that all this fast track stuff is only my imagination. It could be, but I don’t think so. Things I do seem to take longer than those same things used to take. Why is that? Uhm. Ah! I think I know the answer. As one grows older, time passes faster and faster. Time is not a constant thing as I thought. It is on an accelerating path. Next year an hour will not last as long as this year’s hour.

But wait. Let logic prevail. Maybe I came to the wrong conclusion. I think things really move too fast, but time does not really speed up as one grows older. It just seems that way. What really happens is that old folks just get slower and it’s harder to keep up.