Life is passing by very quickly. I have had a couple people tell me recently that time speeds up as you age. It does seem to do that. But a second is still a second. A minute is still a minute.

I think the balance has shifted. I have more time behind me than I do ahead of me. The teeter totter is angling down.

Other people have said that time doesn’t exist. It is just a social construct we’ve created and maintain to manage events.

It’s easy to chart the events from birth to death on a timeline, and this is useful! But I think it is a construct that we will outgrow.

I’m picturing time as a finished painting, and I can only see one brushstroke now. All that was, still is. All that will be, already is.

Or how about a notebook being written in with a ball point pen. The story is being written in indelible ink, but my body confines me to that one tiny moment of interface between pen and paper. The “present”.

When the paintbrush of my body is put down, I will be able to step back and take in the whole picture.

When I talk to groups of kids, I often ask them whether they believe that I truly am a spaceman, and that I can time travel. The younger kids tend to believe that it is so, the older ones, not so much.

So I note the time at the beginning of my talk, and the time when I finish. We travel through that 10 or 15 minutes together, into the future.

Spaceman? Yes. I come from a planet in the Milky Way galaxy, called the Earth.