Why can’t we make time go faster?
Posted early 2010 I was talking on the phone with my sister while she was driving my nephew to an appointment. He’s about six. I won’t tell you how old she was. He kept interrupting, asking how much longer it would be. Finally, he said something that stopped me: “Why can’t we make time go faster?” After we hung up, I realized I hadn’t really answered his question. Most adults might say, “Because,” or “We can’t.” But I wish I had told him that there is a way to control how time feels — and it’s simpler than most people think. The problem is that time works backward. If you try to make it go faster, it slows down. If you try to slow it down, it speeds up. Remember the old saying: a watched pot never boils. That was not an easy lesson for me to learn. In school, I would sit down to take a test and rush through it, constantly checking the clock in a race to finish before time ran out. Most of the time, I lost that race. Then one day I tried something new — a kind of ...