To schoolboys, school years seem to last
For eras, but they'll fly right past
Like locomotives when the ones
Who take the classes are their sons.
The reason for this shift of views
Is that the yardstick that we use
To measure time is life, a thing
Which year-by-year keeps lengthening.
A year, to children who are ten,
Is ten percent of life, but when
It's sixty years those kids have known,
The year seems short. The yardstick's grown.
This insight's far from new, but I
Have never heard a thinker try
Applying it the way we should:
Toward understanding babyhood.
Consider: if we take our prime
Of thirty years as standard, time,
To infants one-week old, we know,
Seems fifteen hundred times as slow.
A week, to them, is thirty years.
What wonder, then, they shed such tears?
We'd feel our dispositions sour
If every second lasted nearly half an hour!
Adults forget the way that once
An hour lasted two whole months
And long, slow, hungry minutes passed
Between the time we saw the nipple and the moment when it reached our mouths at last.
So when you're feeling life's swift pace
Unfair, don't curse the speedy race.
Consider time in babies' eyes;
Be grateful for the way it flies.