The road between my father’s house and school had a stretch with small, rolling hills. My father would always speed up the ups so that our stomachs would drop on the downs of the hills. One day, halfway through the hills, we got stuck behind a Q-tip (that’s what we called elderly drivers because all you can see over their car headrest is a white tuft of hair). The elderly driver was going so slowly we didn’t get to enjoy the hills. My sister and I groaned.

My father said, “Do you know why old people drive so slowly?”

“No,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Because time is moving so fast for them that they feel like they’re moving quickly. Think about it. Each second is a smaller fraction of their life than yours or mine,” he said. “Time seems to go faster as you get older.”

I shrugged then. But, a decade and a half later, I find myself wondering why time runs away from me. I sometimes drive slowly because I feel like I’m rushing even when I have nowhere I need to be. I’ve come to understand what he meant—each second that passes makes every subsequent second a smaller fraction of my life. Funny that time, that constant meter we trust to measure and organize our lives, feels so inconsistent.