by Karen Frazier, Managing Editor
Paranormal Underground Magazine

I don’t know about the rest of you, but time seems to me to be like an accordion. How quickly a set amount of time passes depends on the perspective from which you view it. Depending that perspective, time expands and collapses, changing constantly.

I’ll give you an example. Say you’ve got a big event coming up in a month. The long awaited vacation to some place tropical and sunny. From the perspective of a month before your vacation, time seems to stretch out ahead of you like a vast wasteland that it will take forever to cross. Will next month EVER get here? When it finally arrives, the drive to the airport, the trip through security, the wait for your plane? They all seem interminable. Finally you are there, and your week in paradise disappears in the blink of an eye. What happened? Where did it go? The trip home seems so much quicker than the trip there – even though the distances and the hassles of travel were the same. Now you have arrived on the other side – one month later. How quickly did the month after the vacation pass?

Yes – although we can demonstrate that one week is always the same measurement in days, hours, minutes and seconds, there are some weeks that drag on while others fly by. Perception plays a huge role in the passage of time.

Here’s another example. Remember how long an hour seemed when you were a kid? Especially the last hour of the school day. I’d sit and watch that clock inch towards the bell. Sometimes it even appeared to jump backwards. These days? Holy crap – sometimes I am still in my pajamas when the bell rings. I haven’t eaten. I haven’t cleaned anything. It’s not that I’ve been in bed. The day just flew by from waking up at 6 a.m. until its time to go get the kids from school – and I have absolutely no idea how eight hours have passed from the time they left the house.

Time seems to me to be illusory. I don’t care what the clock says. I don’t care what the calendar says. Time does not pass in an even chugging away of the seconds, hours, minutes, days, weeks, months, years.

This summer was my 25th high school reunion. 25 years. How can that be? I swear to God that just yesterday I was bouncing down the hallways of Bellingham High School with my flash dance sweat shirt, leg warmers and big hair while Loverboy songs ran through my head. I am certain that I just gave birth to a nine pound baby boy, and here he is a teenager who stands taller than me and talks in a booming bass.

And then I look ahead. My son will graduate from high school and go off to college in five years. That seems like a lifetime. In 22 years, I will be eligible for Medicare. That’s so far away I can’t even bother to worry about it.

Time passes in the blink of an eye. The seconds drag by interminably. There’s no sense to it. It just happens. Metamorphoses seemingly happen over night, and yet the thought of making a change seems like it will take forever for the change to come about.

Since I can’t make sense of it, I will do what I always have. I will focus on where I am right now. I’m in a comfy chair. I’ve got my feet up on an ottoman. In my lap, one of my dogs vies for space with my laptop while the other two sleep on a nearby couch. The sun is streaming through my windows. I have a cup of fragrant warm tea next to me. I am, this very moment, participating in my favorite pursuit of writing. If this moment is so sweet, it doesn’t matter how quickly or slowly time passes. I have right now, and it is all I need. Well – almost all. Pretty soon I need to get out of my pajamas, too.