When I was seventeen, it was not a very good year. My father and I had a complicated relationship. We fought frequently. The details are not important but the night I ran away, he’d said that if I as long as I lived in his house, I would live by his rules.
Those rules, it seemed to me, were arbitrary.
And since I did not know how to live by arbitrary rules — I still don’t — I left.
Years later, I’d been through a few things. I had not returned home after running away. My father had finally agreed to sign for me to enter the Navy and I turned 18 in boot camp. I served a Hospital Corpsman and then, when I left the Navy, as an EMT, medical transcriptionist — later owning my own business for a couple of decades doing that while simultaneously spending six years in university because I wanted to learn everything. When I finally decided it was time to graduate and get on with life, I was close to a degree in Anthropology or Philosophy and I had enough other areas that a one-year push could have given me degrees in Linguistics, Psychology, and probably a few other things I’m forgetting now.
I settled on Philosophy and immediately ran into a problem. When I asked Dr. Slinger, one of my mentors, about my chances of making it as a philosopher, he didn’t say why, but didn’t seem to think it was my greatest idea. And, when I looked in the paper? No Help Wanted ads for philosophers.
Instead I helped start the first two Internet Service Providers in Central California before moving on to become the Director of Information Systems at Valley Yellow Pages, then a multi-million-dollar company with offices throughout California and even one in Florida when I started. I designed and built their first really functioning network, tying everything together in real-time.
At VYP, I became fast friends with James (Jim) Varon, in-house counsel. During our many lunches, he kept trying to get me to go to law school. One day, I said, “Jim. Enough. I can’t go to law school.” We’d been talking about a local law school that had a 4-year night program. “By the time I graduate, I’ll be 48 years old.”
And Jim said, “How old will you be in four years if you don’t go to law school?”
Now I’m coming up on 20 years as a criminal defense lawyer in Fresno, California.
But, as one of my favorite legal writers frequently says, “I digest.” (And, yes, I’ve decided I might just steal that habit.)
My parents and I kinda sorta patched things up for a minute and my father and I started having long brunches together whenever I had a case in Hanford, where they’d been living since I was in junior high.
One day, I said, “Remember when I ran away from home?” It was a rhetorical question so the “of course” response was not unexpected coming from my dad.
“Well, I was already 17. But I could not wait what would have been less than a year, when I would have been able to legally walk out the door. That was just too long a wait.”
Dad didn’t respond this time. He waited.
“Well, now I’m in my fifties. And if someone comes to me with a project and they tell me I have a year to complete it, my first question is always, ‘If I need more time, can I have it?’ Because a year just seems to go by so very, very fast.”
And my dad said, “Wait until you’re in your 70s.”
I’m 68 now. Last week, I blinked. And when I finished blinking, I'd lost another week.
In musing over this the last few years, I’ve told friends that I think of it as kind of an experiential thing. Sometimes I’ve compared it to other things you learn, like riding a bicycle. When you first start, you don’t have much experience. You’re paying attention to every moment — every second, actually. You note where your foot is in the arc of a pedaling cycle. You lean and immediately overcorrect because you leaned too far.
But one day, you realize that you’re just getting on the bike and going. You’re not focused on the minutiae over which you stressed and strained to get started. You no longer notice the mechanics of cycling, but you start to pay attention to other things. Before you know it, the ride is over.
Time, I’ve told friends, might be like that. When you’re starting out in life, you don’t have much experience with time. Nor with navigating time. You sit in sixth-grade class and focus on the world’s slowest-moving minute hand on the clock above the teacher’s head. Summer vacation seems like it will never arrive.
At that point, you’ve only got eleven or twelve summers behind you and, hell, you can’t seriously say you even remember more than six or seven of them having happened.
Turns out, like so many of my deep thoughts — James Slinger was right — someone else had it before me. In 1877, which is not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, Paul Janet proposed that a given stretch of time feels shorter in proportion to how much life you've already lived, so a year at 10 is a tenth of your whole existence and a year at 68 is a sixty-eighth.
That’s just a different way, I think, of describing the experiential theory I thought I’d come up with myself.
More recently, Douwe Draaisma, a historian of psychology at the University of Groningen, built an entire book around the idea. In his early 2000’s book, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older, he wrote about autobiographical memory generally — déjà vu, near-death experience, savant memory, and the effects of trauma on recall all get chapters — with the "life speeds up" question as its through-line rather than its whole subject. Draaisma asks (among other things) why time seems to condense and speed up as we age, while distant memories from early life can stay as vivid as yesterday.
Draaisma’s musings meld more with mine. He discusses the density of first-time experience. Childhood and adolescence are packed with firsts (first heartbreak, first job, first everything), and minds log firsts more richly than repetitions, so those years leave more memory-traces behind them. In retrospect, it feels like they lasted longer. On the other end of life, adulthood's routine, comparatively, leaves less to find later, explaining why last year can feel thin when you look back at it, even though it took the same 365 days.
When you drive the same route to and from work every day for 20-25 years, you stop noticing every run. It’s become just part of the routine. Ever have the experience of intending to stop on the way home to run an errand and finding yourself pulling into the driveway having totally forgotten the errand?
This is an oblique outcome of what I earlier I mentioned with Janet’s proportionality thesis. We pedal through Draaisma’s density of first-time experience and after enough rotations, instead of attention saturating every second, we withdraw from the mechanics entirely. Once the skill's automatic, our attention shifts gears.
In 1890, William James’s The Principles of Psychology talks about a beginner's “now” being thick with monitored detail while an expert's “now” glides past because there's nothing left demanding to be noticed inside it. He speaks of the “specious present” — a term coined by E. R. Clay in 1882 — “the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time.”
That wording, by the way, from “Chapter XV” (15), “The Perception of Time” of his book, is virtually identical to what he’d written a blink earlier in his 1886 essay in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy also titled “The Perception of Time”.
And as another “by the way”, E. R. Clay was E. Robert Kelly, a retired cigar maker who’d taken up philosophy as a hobby — which just shows to go ya that anyone can be a philosopher.
William James borrowed this idea of Clay’s as part of a triptych to explain how it is that we perceive time. In essence, “the present” is just “a giant trick”. The lie of the “right now” as some kind of frozen “now” moment is not all there is to our perception of “now”. Clay used the example of music to explain that when we listen to a melody, we don’t just hear one isolated, mathematical vibration at a time, but rather notes trailing together. For Clay, the “present” — the “now” of human experience — was really just a chunk of the recent past passing through our awareness.
It was this deceptive, stretched-out window, that Clay named — and James adopted — as the “specious present”.
A man after my own heart, William James then decided to start mixing metaphors, giving us both the Saddle-Back and the Ship (with its Bow and Stern). With the Saddle-Back we sit atop a horse — a more modern metaphor would be a bicycle seat — able to naturally look forward and backward at the same time. Thus, as Clay before him had noted, the apparently fake present contains within it more than the razor’s edge of time. James actually finds this necessary because, he says, if our minds really worked like a razor-thin knife-edge of the exact present, we would be forever trapped in the now, unable to perceive the past. Instead, our window of “now” is like a single ship — or to avoid mixing metaphors, bicycle — the rearview of which holds onto the echo of what just happened while the bow anticipates what will happen next.
One block of consciousness sits atop the bicycle seat, holding everything together, so that time becomes a single smooth-running path — or as William James with his Ship’s Bow and Stern view put it, a smooth, flowing river.
I need to clear this up a little, though, because while William James is mixing metaphors, I’ve slightly mixed chapters.
In The Principles of Psychology, while William James does casually re-invoke the “stream” to describe the general flow of events passing through the specious present, the explicit declaration that consciousness is a “river or a stream” is actually the foundational centerpiece of an earlier chapter — Chapter IX (9) — “The Stream of Thought”. In the “Time” chapter, he beautifully compared the specious present to a rainbow on a waterfall, standing permanent, while the events of our lives stream right through it.
I’ve carried on enough, though, and finished what I started a blink ago. It’s time to leave James behind — James Slinger and William James. My dad fell of the bicycle on December 1, 2021, having metaphorically pedaled through 81 actually-lived years. Even if he had lived to see me reach my 70s, he would not have known: Alzheimer’s took him long before Death did. Now, I pedal on without him.
But the nice thing about the seat of consciousness?
All I need to do to see him again is look back and there he is with his goofy grin, holding up the past.