New Year's Eve, 2006. Since New Year's Eve 2005 happened about five minutes ago, I'm inspired this year to propose a theory ...

We're spinning too fast.

Yep. That's all there is to it; there's been a speed-up in the rate of spin our globe does daily, and that's making time go faster than it used to. It's been a gradual process, but year-by-year we go just a tad bit faster and faster until today we're up to about three times the speed we spun in the 1950s.

When I was a child, old folks of fifty-five (my age now) would complain about time passing too quickly, and comment on how fast Christmases would come around. Now, however, even kids are noticing how short Santa's North Pole time is and are wondering how he manages to get everything done. Twenty-year-olds are suffering Dorian Grey-like moments with their mirrors. Forty-year-olds know their thirties only as a blur.

Sure, you'd think the science guys (guys, by the way being a gender-neutral term in this case) would be on to this, that atomic clocks and celestial gauges would have been alerting us to the changes as they happened, but you'd be wrong in that thought. Even the most massive brain in the head of the world's smartest science guy can't wrap itself around the time thing. Since we're stuck here on the surface of the planet, we're bound by the limits of the real stuff ... that being the stuff that is real in the universe we inhabit, not some alternate universe we can neither see, touch or comprehend ... and terminally interlocked within the rhythm of our sunrises and sunsets.

A day is a day, and twenty-four hours are what they are. When our universe decides the twenty-four hours now pass in what used to be forty-eight or seventy-two, who are we to know or argue?

A sneaking suspicion that all is not well hits most everyone, as collective memory tells us that we once knew a more leisurely pace, and this breathless rush toward future and oblivion does not feel right way down deep in the genetic memory we carry in our bones.

So, is there anything we can do to slow things down again? To make the spin less spinny, not so frantic? To give us back the time we used to have?

I suppose we could try.

Continued ...