The Long Periods of My Life

As I grow older, I marvel at how quickly time passes.

Let alone days and nights, even months and years slip by so swiftly.

Everyone suffers from the same condition.

As children, we would leave home in the morning and go to school.

During breaks, we played games.

Even after school ended, we continued playing in the streets.

Yet the day never seemed to end.

The next day was exactly the same.

But nothing could match the length of summer holidays.

As soon as the final school bell rang, we would head to the village.

Those old enough helped with fieldwork,

while the younger ones went to the mosque.

At mid-afternoon we would gather again and keep playing until evening.

We did not wear watches back then.

Because we had no business with time—it was already long enough,

as long as it needed to be.

Yet I first became aware of the concept of timetime when I was receiving religious education in one of the mosques, I remember.

Our teacher was listing the signs of the Day of Judgment.

According to these, as the Day of Judgment drew near,time would flow rapidly.

So much so that, according to tradition, a month would pass as quickly as a week.

As a ten-year-old child, this struck me as strange.

I wondered inwardly: how could such a vast month of July possibly end in just a week?

And indeed, it never did.

When autumn arrived, we returned to school once more.

This cycle continued for a long time.

Then came high school, then university, and gradually distances—more accurately, obligations—entered between us and those long summer holidays. They never returned.

Thus, the long stretches of my life—my childhood years—have now faded into the past.

Recently, I read an article investigating this phenomenon^【1】.

It described how the perception of time changes with age.

The researchers divided participants into groups based on age.

Those under 30 formed one group; those over 50 formed another.

They asked participants to close their eyes and mentally count out 120 seconds.

They then calculated the average time each group estimated.

The group under 30 averaged 115 seconds.

The group over 50 averaged 87 seconds.

For the younger group, their internal sense of time clearly flowed more slowly.

The article also noted that this phenomenon is not coincidental but directly linked to dopamine levels in the brain.

Accordingly, dopamine is a hormone associated with feelings of well-being, among other functions.

It is secreted in greater amounts during activities that support survival instincts—eating and drinking, competing, creating, and so on.

Thus, time perception expands.

Conversely, in states such as sadness, anxiety, or depression, which suppress dopamine release, time perception narrows, the article continued.

Another study suggested that the human brain optimizes memory by not storing repetitive events.

After all, as children, every experience is new.

Almost every moment leaves a distinct mark in memory.

But as we grow older, things change.

I pass through each moment; days begin to blur into one another.

And time accelerates.

Because now, rarely does anything happen for the first time.

The writer who says that nothing in life is as it appears or is experienced, but only as it is remembered, is right.

Yet, accepting these findings as foundational, it is possible to resist, to some extent, this illusion imposed upon human consciousness.

Certainly, by engaging in new activities that consciousness has never experienced before and that leave no trace in memory.

In other words, by stepping outside routine.

What lies outside routine differs for everyone.

Otherwise, it is difficult to stand before this flood of time.

It sweeps away whatever you try to hold onto.

Indeed, those who have long conversations with the elderly know that the subject always circles back to the fleeting passage of time.

As if they have something they cannot reclaim or return.

They say, time has flowed like water, and we understood nothing, with deep regret.

Or perhaps with a sense of having been deceived—I am not sure.

For them, neither the freshness of childhood remains nor the old rhythms of life.

A small apocalypse has arrived: a month has become like a week.

And the sign described by our teacher in the mosque has, in this sense, come to pass.