I\u2019ve long felt that I understood why this was. Let me give it a shot.<\/p>\n
For a newborn, the second day it\u2019s outside and breathing is 50% of its entire life. For a six-year-old, half of their life is three years \u2013 much more. It\u2019s not a big percentage, but it\u2019s much smaller than 50%. For a sixteen-year-old, half their life is eight years.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re forty \u2013 half your life is twenty years. 1\/8 versus 1\/20? It\u2019s amazingly different. We don\u2019t perceive life as a line. We\u2019re living inside of it \u2013 we compare our lives to the only thing we have . . . our lives. Each day you live is smaller than the last.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s not everything.<\/p>\n
As we age, novelty decreases. When we\u2019re young, experiences and knowledge are coming at us so quickly that we are presented with novel (new and unique) information daily. New words. New thoughts. New ideas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I have known this and have explained it to my sons and to everyone who will listen.<\/p>\n
I have some photos rotating on my auxiliary monitor beside me; one crops up of the boys with medals for a middle school event. To me, it was very recent; to the boys, this was, what, 2018? A long time ago<\/em>. By the time that period elapses again, the oldest will be out of the house, and the youngest will be, what, a junior in high school? The whole lives that they have known here will only be an interlude in my life, and the soon-to-be-over beginning of the rest of their lives. I’ve known this, too, for a while–I have been saying that we’re on the downhill slide since the oldest was nine<\/em>. But it gets realer and realer in my imagination.<\/p>\nI already grieve for this time, even as I spend too much of it on work and other things or being frustrated\/exasperated with them when I’m with them. Fortunately, I will only remember the best parts. And not my own, what, dread of our separation?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was talking to the woman at the cleaners who handles my eldest’s JROTC uniform weekly about how time passes differently for kids versus we elder folk because each year is a larger percentage of their lives than ours. So a kid who’s fifteen, his fifteenth year is 7 percent of his life, and likely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29001,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29000\/revisions\/29001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}