How Many Days 'Till Christmas?

Where is this year going?"

How many times have you either said or heard that recently?

It seems like the 4th of July was just a few weeks ago and now we're trying to figure out what to do for Thanksgiving. Football season is nearly half over. The stores are an eclectic mess with Halloween decorations and front lawn Santas displayed side by side.

If it seems that time is passing quickly, you're right.

According to an article in Inc. Magazine, research shows that our brain's internal clock runs more slowly as we age, giving us the impression that life is speeding up.

Other research offers that the perceived passage of time is related to the amount of new information we absorb. When we're young, pretty much everything is new, which means we have more to process thus making time seem longer. As we get older, less and less is new.

There's still other scientific work that suggests that the release of dopamine starts to drop past the age of 20, which also makes time appear to go by quicker.

I'll never forget one summer when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old. The days seemed to be lasting forever and I was getting bored. I complained about my boredom one night to my Dad when he came home from work. He told me: "Enjoy all this time while you have it.  Some day you'll wonder where it all went." Now maybe that's a bit strong to say to a little kid, but I've always remembered it.

There is one thing that always seem to go by quickly, no matter how young or old you are: vacation.

It seems that you just arrive and it's time to go.

When my in-laws got a small place in Clearwater, Florida, we didn't understand the fascination. As we've gotten older, we've seen the light. We've just come back from our latest trip  -- and it seems like we went months ago.  We're already trying to figure out when we can get back and how much longer we can stay.

We love Cape Cod, but Florida is pretty cool, too.

I Guess I Got Retired

I somehow thought that there would have been more fanfare.

Maybe an email from a higher up with a fancy title announcing that after years of dedicated service I was trading in my laptop and cell phone for golf clubs and a beach chair. No more early morning meetings and evening events.

But, it didn't happen that way.

I only recently realized that I got retired when listening to my wife describe how I became involved in her successful real estate practice.

"After Hank retired," she explains to our clients "he got his license to work with me and be my Marketing Director."

I didn't think of it that way as I was being clumsily dumped -- on a Monday morning literally minutes after returning from vacation -- from a job I enjoyed. I had envisioned a more gradual transition to retirement over the next few years cutting back to more of a consulting role and training my successor.

I was told the my departure was part of a reorganization. At least I had warning. My boss, our Executive Director, was offed the previous Friday morning and given an hour to vacate the building because what was described as "temporary leadership" from a similar organization in a nearby community was meeting with our staff in two hours.

We were the only ones officially reorganized. But within a few months, most of our staff was gone. Some were long term employees, others were more recent additions, but all committed for the long haul, which we knew was needed to  move the organization from just OK to the community force it needed to be. We were starting to chip away at the obstacles we had to get through, including our volunteer leadership that -- with few exceptions -- was allergic to fundraising and even promoting the organization.

I was six months shy of my 65th birthday and replaced by someone younger. I toyed with the idea of making some noise about age discrimination, but decided it really wasn't worth the effort.

Ultimately, volunteer leadership approved a merger with the larger group folding our organization into a generic "....of Metro South," an ill defined geographic location that you can't even find on a map. Lost in the process was our organization's historic name and legacy as a founding member of the national group.

I'm not looking for sympathy. This kind of thing happens all the time. But that doesn't make it right.

A move like this must have been cooking for months. Yet, we went forward just a few weeks before with our annual meeting and appreciation breakfast complete with all the "its-gonna-be-a-great-year-looking-forward-to-working-with-you-guys" talk from folks, who had to be intimately involved in the scheme. Maybe it's me, but I couldn't be that hypocritical.

Fortunately, it  has all turned out more than fine.

My former boss now heads a regional office of one of the nation's more visible non-profits. She hobnobs with celebrities and just might raise in a night an amount that we would have been thrilled with for a year. Success can be the greatest revenge.

I've been busy since getting retired. In addition to working for my wife, I've fulfilled a bucket list item by being full time faculty again at a local university, where I continue to teach as an adjunct. I actually played golf on a regular basis this summer and took 20 strokes off my score. (Yup, I was that bad.) I conduct organizational communications seminars for a major Rhode Island non-profit and have been encouraged to offer my services to other agencies.

Is there a moral to this story?

One could certainly be cynical and say you should trust no one; watch your back, and git while the gettin's good.

I prefer to say be true to yourself and do the best job you can. If the people around you aren't exactly trustworthy, at least you'll have no regrets.

And you can sleep at night...