“How was school today?” I asked my young student at the start of her session.
She paused, considering her answer.
“Long,” she said, eventually.
“Oh really?” I enquired. “Did you have extra commitments before or after lessons, then?”
“Oh no,” she said. “It just felt long.”
“Ah,” I said. “I remember that. Time passes so slowly at your age. An hour can feel like an absolute eternity.”
“Oh my God,” she squealed, warming instantly to the subject. “We had double maths at the end of the day. I tried not to look at the clock as it’s the worst thing you can do, but I couldn’t resist it when I thought that surely it must have been at least half an hour gone, and we’d only done ten minutes!“
Oh, how I remember that feeling. For me, it was double geography. Poor Mrs Winslow’s descriptions of the savannah were so boring, I almost cried before each lesson, just at the thought of it. The time I had to spend listening to her stretching out ahead of me felt almost unbearable. I told my young student this and she nodded, fervently. For the young, time passes unbelievably slowly: it stretches into plains as wide as the savannah itself. Waiting for the end of the day feels like crossing a continent.
The immense sluggishness of time is perhaps our earliest companion, a constant presence, crouched in the corners of long afternoons, humming softly in the background. In good times, such as a long summer holiday, the seemingly endless stretches of the future to come are a welcome wonder; at the beginning of double maths, the lethargic passage of time feels like a yawning chasm, a charybdis that will swallow us whole. Each day feels both monumental and tedious. Each hour feels like an an arctic expedition.
Birthdays are essential, bright markers in that vast childhood abyss. To turn six, ten, thirteen — these are grand ascents and each new age feels like a gift. We count down the days, the weeks, the yawning months leading up to the celebration. The anticipation stretches out: slow and sweet but painfully long. It hangs in the air until it became almost unbearable. The day of arrival is luminous, the moment we finally get to unwrap the future we’ve been waiting for.
The way that the young perceive time can perhaps explain why so many of us remember those apocryphal long, hot summers. Lengthy school holidays feel truly colossal for children. Long mornings in pyjamas, drifting from cereal bowls to cartoons, then out into the world of bikes and sun-warmed pavements. Forts built out of sticks and blankets, bedroom kingdoms whose borders shift each day. Tadpoles in rivers, catching time in our hands. Summer inhabits a place where time is measured not by the clock or the calendar but by how many ice lollies we can melt along our wrists, how many bugs we can catch before dusk.
It is easy to forget how profoundly we once lived in these slow hours. As adults, we compress our days like folders, stashing them briskly into the cabinet of our memory. We hurry, we rush, we tick things off our to-do list. Children cannot constrict their days in this way. The agony of double maths is matched only by the ecstasy of free time, each day of which is immense and sprawling. Watching raindrops slide down a window feels like an event. Waiting in the car while a parent runs into the local shop is an adventure. Sitting at the dinner table, politely bored, feels like a vast eternity. We do not know that those minutes are brief and precious: we only feel that they are ours to endure.
Most of us forget, or remember only faintly, the extent to which childhood is a seemingly endless world of waiting. Waiting for the weekend, waiting for your turn, waiting for your parents to finish talking, waiting for the world to move on. Waiting, when you are young, is not the subtle impatience of adulthood: it is tangible, heavy, unbearable. Sat in a hot car seat, legs sticking to the leather. Time pools around you like syrup.
Then there comes a moment — unnoticed when it happens — when time begins to accelerate. Maybe it starts in late adolescence, when school is suddenly over. Or maybe it happens after we leave home, when greater responsibility claims our hours with a firm hand. The days fold in on themselves. A week becomes a blink. Summer vanishes before it begins. We look at the calendar and feel genuinely startled that entire months have passed. We ask where the time has gone, though the answer is always the same: somewhere unimportant, somewhere ordinary, somewhere we did not think to look. As John Lennon said, “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”
Time speeding up is not merely a trick of perception; it is a change in how we function. With the familiarity of life, novelty fades and we no longer pause to savour each moment. Instead, we move efficiently, sliding from one experience to the next without pause or comment. We stop noticing the play of light on the wall, the smell of rain on the pavement. We stop counting down the days until our birthdays and start dreading them. We forget what it felt like to wait and we believe that things will always come soon enough. Too soon.
Being reminded by my young student of how time felt when I was younger makes me reflect upon how I spend it now. Perhaps, if we try, we can learn to cultivate that profound slowness again. We can take long walks, not to arrive anywhere, but to experience the act of moving through space. We can sit outside at dusk. We can allow an afternoon to lengthen lazily away. And sometimes, in such moments, time stretches like it used to. Not quite as far, but enough to remind us that it’s still there. Perhaps, if we pay attention to it, the slowness of childhood never truly leaves us. Perhaps it waits patiently, tucked into our memory like a pressed flower. Perhaps we carry it everywhere, even if we rarely take it out to admire it. Perhaps a scent, a song or a certain angle of sunlight can return us to that early, languid world. Perhaps we can find ourselves lying in thick summer grass once again, listening to the buzzing of invisible insects, watching clouds drift lazily overhead. Perhaps we can feel those hours stretch out, and feel ourselves stretched inside them.
