November... so soon?

I just realized that it is November... already. Tomorrow everyone votes. In a couple weeks we eat Turkey and then the holiday decorations start going up... and another year will have flown by. It's not... surprising, I suppose. When we are young, a year is such a large amount of time compared to the body of our memories and experience... at ten, it's a whole tenth of our life, perhaps as much as twenty percent of our functional memory and experience. By our twenties, a single year no longer seems such a large factor... after all, a year only adds another 5-6% to the total body of our experience at that point... though we gain so much in our maturity/adulthood at that stage, as a year at twenty is perhaps a third of our total time on our own, outside of high school. But by our thirties, even leaving out our childhood years, a year is a small fraction of our total lifespan. By fortyfive or fifty, half of our lifetime has been as an adult and a new year worth of experiences is less than five percent of the time we've been an adult.. let alone been alive.

So the years, as we accumulate experience, seem to race forward ever faster... making it harder for a given moment to mean as much... for something new to overturn habits and experiences already engrained. Sad... and frightening... and worth contemplating. If we could discard years of our experiences... shed memories that aren't important to our nature but serve as anchors in time and create this perspective of new years flying by... could we regain our control over this passage of time? Turn the passage of a year into something meaningful again? A significant amount of time, in which each day, encounter, and idea is relevant in ways that are lost when held in perspective to a half century of living?

For your reading pleasure today, I'd like to bring up the next part (Part 2) of Nagrij's Fantasy piece for the Library. This section of "Dim Prisons and Drakes" runs from chapter 6 through chapter 9 of this piece. You can find a link to it over in the Latest Articles list at the top of the right hand sidebar, or in the Library section under Stories... in the sub-category "Unique Fantasy." Enjoy!