Pretty much all old people complain about how time moves faster now than it did when we were younger. An hour can, and frequently does, feel like 10 minutes to me. But if you compare your clock to a young person's, they match no matter what your subjective estimate of time's passage is.

Children are well known to have an opposite “wait” problem with time. Even when their birthday is due in a week, it feels to them like the day will never arrive.

I have my own theory about what makes time perception so different between children and old people. I doubt it's unique – I probably read it somewhere but here it is:

Children have short attention spans. They switch what they are doing more frequently than grownups. Coloring is fine until the dog wanders by and the kid wants a snuggle. Then she settles down with a new favorite book until that pales and she tracks down the movie, Frozen. And so on.

In that same period of time, her grandmother has probably read a few news stories – one activity compared to several of the child's. The child, obviously has many different and more importantly, often new experiences in that period which tends to stretch out their time perception, making the activity more memorable than an adult's with fewer new activities.

I've spent a lot of time in my life trying to figure out the slipperiness of time and I've accumulated a small but impressive library of books on the subject.

The website, Exactly what is...TIME?, has collected a lot of information about time too and made it easy for non-philosophers and non-physicists to understand.

People have been trying to figure out time since – well, time immemorial. According to that website:

”Nearly two and a half thousand years ago, Aristotle contended that, 'time is the most unknown of all unknown things', and arguably not much has changed since then.”

No kidding.

In general, time cannot even be adequately defined. Many years ago, I kept a fortune cookie fortune taped to my desk because its definition of time seemed to me to be as good as anyone else's and practical too:

”Time is nature's way of making sure everything doesn't happen at once.”

Works for me. And now I find out that definition is prominently listed on the Time website, where you can also read about black holes (where time began?), the big bang, deep time, space-time and many other theories of time.

Not to mention an excellent sources and references section if you want to dig further and deeper.

Since the mysteries of time are unlikely to be solved any time soon, I'll see if there is anything I can do about my personal difficulty on the subject:

My lament nowadays is how long it takes to do almost anything compared to the past. Apparently I move at about half the speed I once did and time itself seems to be moving at least twice as fast as it did back then. You do the math – no wonder I'm always behind.

What about you?

My former husband and I held our biweekly chitchat yesterday - The Alex and Ronni Show. We discussed my “new look”, parents, old age and related topics.

Or planned? Or expected?

To avoid misunderstanding, let me stipulate up front that new beginnings, new goals, renewed aspirations and purpose come about at any age. But for most of us who hang out at this blog, our working lives have ended or are winding down and our private lives, too, have probably changed a great deal from 25, 30, 40 years ago.

If I live as long as my internet friends, Millie Garfield and Darlene Costner who are both 91, I have at least another 16 years – time enough to pursue all kinds of possibilities whatever amount of new knowledge and learning they might require.

Generally, however, by age 75 or so we slow down and even ignoring the barriers society places in the way of elders who seek new ventures (paid or not), it is also a time when it is useful to take stock of where we have been and what we have done over a half century or more - how we have used all that time and consider how it has turned out for us.

I've been doing a bit of that during these waning days of summer.

Today's children are pressured almost from the cradle to choose a career path. Nothing like that happened to our generation, especially for women. If we were to work at all in the mid-20th century, it was understood to be a stopgap until we found a husband and retired from the workforce for motherhood.

But I knew that wasn't for me partly because, when I graduated from high school at age 17, I still felt like a little girl. There was so much to learn, so many places to go, people to meet, things to do. I felt unprepared.

There was, however, the question of college. The University of California at Berkeley was a short trip across San Francisco Bay from where I lived, easily affordable in those days, and my mother said I could live at home and commute if I chose that. Otherwise, get a job, she said.

Two things about college. From a young age I was generally a loner and although I was at ease with most grownups I was equally uncomfortable with my contemporaries.

The idea of arriving at the Berkeley campus and undoubtedly needing to ask some kid I ran into where to go paralyzed me. I know that makes no sense but that's how it was for me then.

If college had been required for some reason, I would have managed. But it wasn't, which brought me to the second thing, the rationalization.

I had no idea what to study or what I wanted to do for a living. From day one in school I had been an A student, was an enthusiastic learner and craved more knowledge. If anyone had bothered to ask me what I wanted to know, I would have answered in a flash: “Oh, everything.”

So with no life plan available, I went to work as an office clerk in San Francisco. I hung out with Beatniks in Sausalito and North Beach and those amazing people who were mostly 10 to 20 and more years older than I saw to my continuing education by sneaking me into jazz clubs, sending me to avant garde movies, giving me books they required I read and including me in their wide-ranging, all-night discussions, debates and dialogues.

During these years (because of them?) I continued to ask myself what I wanted to be when I grew up. Nothing came to me. I liked my life if you didn't count the mindless office typing and clerking jobs.

When I tired of the fruitless internal debate about my future, I deliberately decided not to make a choice and I made a big deal of that. I made no decision my life plan: I would keep putting one foot in front of the other, I told myself, follow whatever interesting stuff turned up and see where it took me.

And oh my, that worked so well for me that here I am still doing it, now with a blog. In between, I fell into media – first radio, then television and for the last ten years of my paid career, the internet.

What a glorious ride it has been and still is, gathering in all the ideas, knowledge and collective thought I have time to track down about – “oh, everything.”

I've never tired of it because by definition, the media I worked (and still work) in requires constant learning and understanding it well enough to report on it to others.

Back when I was trying to find life path, I didn't know there was such a category of - well, let's call it “See what happens” that for me has turned out to be right up there with to doctor, lawyer, Indian chief.

Now and then I still question it. Lately, especially just after I've been in touch with Millie or Darlene, I ask myself if I shouldn't make a plan for these next 15 or 16 years, choose something and follow my bliss, as it were. Be more deliberate about choices than I've been for the first 75 years.

Then my wits return. Nah. Even not knowing what I've wanted, not having a plan or expectation, it's turned out fine for me.

What about you?

EDITORIAL NOTE: Since sometime in 2003 when I first began thinking about creating this blog, I have kept a notebook, a journals if you will or maybe it is what used to be called a commonplace book - now a collection of many.

These are where I make notes and lists, write down thoughts and notions and questions, paste clippings, copy quotations and ruminate on ageing in general, for myself and for possible blog posts.

It is a way of not losing what often are no more than little wisps of ideas to think about later. Eventually, you get to read some of this stuff but there is much, much more that never gets beyond my initial jottings.

For several months I've been thinking that some of this material might be worthy of your consideration but sometimes ideas don't become real until they have a name.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, “Mental Doodles” popped into my mind. I like it. And so, now and then I'll write a Mental Doodles column wherein I drop two or three scribbles from my commonplace book on you and you can make of them what you will.

Here goes. See what you think.

UNRELIABLE MEMORY: Most old people complain about unreliable memories although it's generally not important stuff we forget, just misplaced keys or something similar. Irritating, for sure, but now I have identified an advantage.

I can rewatch television shows and movies and enjoy them as much as the first time because I can't remember whodunit. This happens most frequently with favorite TV shows such as (recently) The Good Wife and NCIS. Sometimes I don't notice until halfway through the show that I'm watching a repeat.

Just so you know, this is not the same thing as watching favorite old movies and knowing not only what happens next but exactly what the dialogue is - The Third Man in my case. That is a different kind of pleasure.

CROSSING “THE LINE”: You never know when it's going to happen to you and no one can put a date on it for you because we grow old in appearance (and other ways too) at different rates.

But the day arrives for each of us - unpredicted, unplanned but inevitably - when you step across an invisible line and from that moment forward, anyone can take away your adult privileges.

They will fire you from your job or not hire you. Because you are now old. They will assume you can't hear well just because your face is wrinkled and shout at you. They will say demeaning things to you like, “And how are we today, young lady?” Because you are old.

Politicians will regularly try to take away the benefits you have earned. Because you are old. And so much more you won't like. Because you stepped across that invisible line and now you are old.

THE MYSTERY OF OLD AGE: Being healthy. Only minor afflictions, mostly ignorable. What will go wrong? How bad will it be? Will I be able to handle it? What am I supposed to do to prepare?

Maybe nothing goes wrong and I just quietly die one day. Since there is no way to know, does that mean I'm wasting my time wondering about these things?