Coming back to school is always rough; the first few weeks of classes inevitably feel rushed, assignments pile up in terrifying proportions, and sleep deprivation settles back in. This year was no exception; I'm already up to my ears in work, college paperwork, and other assorted tasks which I must complete, and I'm averaging five hours of sleep a night. Long gone are the summer nights of 10 luxurious hours of rest; they have been replaced by their less effective and less kind counterpart, caffeine.
The thing is, this year is flying by much quicker than any year before it. Already, this is the third week of school, and we're well into our coursework for the year. Everything feels rushed, not just class periods, but lunch and home-time as well. Time is flying, but not only when I'm having fun; it's ticking by with a seemingly increasing rate even as I type this blog post. I know, of course, that time cannot be truly increasing in speed; one minute is still composed of 60 seconds, and those seconds remain the same length, but all the same, time feels compressed.
When I try to assess my problem, I find that it certainly ties in with the Ways of Knowledge; Emotion, Perception, and Reason in particular. Emotion in the sense that stress and worrying seem to influence the speed which I feel time is passing at, and Reason because logically thinking out the problem does seem to sway time's passage in my favor, if only temporarily and on a minor scale. Perception is involved ore obviously; it is with my skills (or perhaps, lack thereof) of perception that I notice the slowing or quickening of the passage of time.
Looking into the situation further, a few questions come up. Primarily, we must ask, does time always pass at the same objective speed? The scientific definitions of each component of a day, an hour, a minute, or a second indicate that yes, time is a stable quantity in this particular equation, and thus, the flaw is not within the machinery of my watch, but within the machinery of my brain.
In the end, the questions are reduced to these:
To what degree do one's emotions affect one's perception of the passage of time?
To what extent do reason and emotion moderate each other in their influence the perception of time's passage?
