You asked me to ponder time during my vacation, which is a time capsule more pleasant than, but similar to, a cave.

Way back when I was single and childless, I tried to fill my vacations with adventure–ie novelty. Mongolia, Nepal, etc. So I remember them vividly and they did seem to pass “slowly”, meaning that so much living was packed into a week or two that, when I got back home, it seemed as though months had passed.

(Actually, the speed metaphor gets confusing here: If more distance has been passed, time should have gone faster)

The other kind of vacation is the total relaxation of staring at palm trees on a plantation just adjacent to a beautiful beach, where every day is deliberately the same, ie devoid of novelty. The goal is relaxation, recovery. And yes, time speeds up in the sense that the days blend into each other, you lose sense of which day of the week it is (to the extent that you need to check your plane ticket to discover that your vacation is already over). You don’t know afterwards where the time went.

But: this time around, I didn’t quite sink into that second (pleasurable) time acceleration, and the reason is children. Perhaps because their time is so slow, but really because they exhaust and thrill you just as much on vacation as at home, time does not really accelerate whenever they’re around.

But if we absorb ourselves in something while we wait, like surf the net on our laptops, the food will have cooked, or the train will have arrived, before we know it.

To make time disappear like this, is what any of us can do whenever we feel like it.