Living at the Speed of Light

The pace of life gets faster every year. Don't you think so?

My mother, and her mother before her, used to warn about "burning the candle at both ends." In other words, don't stay up late and get up early and not get enough sleep in the middle. So what do I do? I stay up until 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 in the morning and get up at 7:15, on weekdays at least. There never seems to be enough hours in the day to accomplish everything.

Are you old enough to remember when we thought computers would make things easier and we'd have so much more freetime? They certainly made communication faster, but are the quick emails, Facebook updates, tweets and text messagesthe kind of quality communiques that our parents and grandparents exchanged? Heck, I still have letters from my teenage years, when I had penpals, that are more substantive than any communication I've had in the past ten years.

Do you recall the days, not so long ago, when only doctors and a handful of real estate agents had a mobile phone? Have theymade us more productive? No, they just make driving or crossing the street more dangerous, because at least a third of thepeople behind the wheel at any given time will be holding a phone to their heads or reading a text or typing a message andpaying no attention at all to what's going on around them.

A prophet named Mother Shipton wrote to following couplets during the first half of the sixteenth century:

Around the world men's thoughts will fly,
quick as the twinkling of an eye.
And water shall great wonders do,
How strange, and yet it shall come true. 

All those years ago, she saw it coming. Did you?

It used to be forever between Easter and Christmas, and now the days, months, years just whiz by as though the Earth is speeding up in its journey around the sun.


Or is it just me?