compression warp factor” used by a fighter pilot who explained it

as flying so fast that when you launch your missiles, before they

have time to activate, you have flown ahead of them to become the

target. I don’t know if it is a real thing, but it sounds cool. The

term also has roots in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. I can’t

explain either concept, or get past the first chapter of Stephen

Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” but I do have my own Time

Compression Warp Factor theory that I can

compresses in on itself with interesting phenomena. The calendar

says your birthday is today, but you swear the last one was

yesterday. That it is June, but Christmas was just last week. The

grass is a foot high, and you wonder that it could grow like that

overnight. Children and grandchildren who were toddlers in the

morning are teenagers in the afternoon. There are now 50 seconds to

a minute, a like number of minutes for an hour, 20 hours to the

day, five days to the week, three weeks to the month, 10 months to

a year, and years are now bundled into seven to the decade, but are

what a week used to be. Time is

terms “Time flies,” or “They grow up so fast,” or “I need a 25-hour

day,” and my personal favorite, “Where does all the time go?” I

wait for the teen years and all their coolness. When I lived long

enough to be a teen, I yearned for the independence of young

adulthood. At 19, I was immortal. Time stretched out for me and

appeared endless. That is the way it is with

someone near us who dies. For me, it was other immortals in combat.

We realized that there was an end, and it gave life a new

perspective. We did not have an unlimited amount of time, but

observation told us that there were people out there who were old,

that it took a long time to get that way, and we would at least

In any marching group, unless someone is calling cadence, the steps

continue to be rhythmic, but become faster and faster until we are

all out of step and aren’t marching anymore, but running toward

what, we do not know, but we’re going to get there

the Time Compression Warp Factor. When we are young, time stretches

out to infinity. There’s plenty of time for family, career, civic

duty, church, etc., but somewhere along the way, our plans get

derailed, our bucket list doesn’t get any shorter and when we’re

through with the things we have to do, the things we want to do are

realize, “Yeah, I’m mortal. I don’t have an unlimited supply of

this stuff called time. How am I going to spend the rest of

wondering where did it all go? We feel we have to squeeze a whole

lot of living into what time is left. When this happens, the

minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, seasons, decades all

seem to run together and cram into each other. The devices we use

to measure these amounts of time say that they are the same, but a

lifetime of living tells us that they are not. We are now flying so

is a real thing; coming soon to a life near