EXPONENTIAL REFLECTIONS

I've been off sick today, so it seemed like a good opportunity for some writing and some reflection.

Time goes quickly doesn't it. A friend of mine, 28, remarked recently that it felt as though an accelerator switch gets flicked on when you reach your mid-twenties. Time's no longer a constant but a rapidly shortening wave that pushes you along its crest whether you like surfing it or not.

Meanwhile, I have other friends (my age) whose kids are 'flying the nest'. I thought empty-nest syndrome was a generation away from me, but here it is - old school friends will probably soon start to become grandparents, and I'll be drinking flasks of tea in the park and saying hello to the local dogs.

To be fair, I do that anyway, but it's not as 'old' as it sounds. Unless time has run away and I've not noticed.

My theory is that memory is all about percentages. When you're young, you haven't added a lot to the memory database, so there's plenty of room for all the data to stretch out. Five years of memory is 50% of all the information carried by a ten year old, but it's only 12.5% of that of someone who's 40. We have to work our computers much harder, much faster to remember further back - and so we process the passage of time quicker.

It's also worth saying that there are plenty of people my age who have younger children - tweens and teens mostly, and they're 'enjoying' that particular phase of parenting, probably sometimes with envious eyes of the 'carefree' life of the bachelor. There are also others (though not many) who are like me and live and work alone, day in, day out. Kudos to them.

Speaking of relativistic time contraction, have you noticed how reporters keep saying the virus infection rate is growing 'exponentially'?

This was my next reflection today. 'Exponential' means something specific in physics: typically that growth is happening proportionally to the value. Or if you like, f(x) = a^x, where a is some constant or other. In fact, it's usually a very particular constant that falls out of the unique way that the universe works, but we won't go into that. What I mean is that this situation can't be precisely calculated as classically exponential, and so 'exponential' has become a synonym for sort of 'rapid and out of control' - like a chain reaction in an atom bomb, or rabbits who can't stop reproducing. I don't think that's what's happening out there; it might be difficult, but it still can be controlled! We hope.

It's not what I've got. What I've got is more digestive than respiratory, thankfully. I mused once again though, that if I were a parent, perhaps if I were a single parent, I'd find this bit of that job extremely difficult. How do you keep going when you're ill? How do you bend down to tie up laces, how do you prepare a dinner that makes you want to be sick, how do you put the bins out, how do you deal with a fight or read a bedtime story? How do you even lock the bathroom? While I lie here, moaning like a World War II outpatient, I'm quite grateful that I'm reasonably well wired-up for the situation I find myself in.

And if time really does speed up as you get older, maybe this will pass much faster than I remember. Hope so.