quantum leaps

So, every day, I get a day older. I understand this. I even get that every day, everyone else gets a day older, even if I do not see them or think about them. (I understand the latter point and yet reserve the right to be continually amazed by it in particular instances.)

This is not, however, how I have experienced aging over the last 15 or so years (prior to that, to my knowledge, I did not experience aging at all, but just growing.) The way I have experienced aging has been more punctuated, where I will go through some extensive time where I feel I'm basically a certain age, and then over a relatively rapid period I come to feel I am a different (older) age, then I will feel that different age for an extended while, and so on. Graduate school basically had three phases for me. As those phases were beginning I had this rapid-accumulating sensation of feeling older, but while the phases themselves were going on I felt basically the same age.

We are coming up on the sixth anniversary of my finishing my dissertation and moving to Madison. In that time, I do feel like I've aged about six years. But like about my 5th or 6th semester, I felt like I abruptly aged two years, then in the months before moving to Cambridge I aged another two years, and then this fall I've felt the sudden phenomenochrono-lurch forward again another two years. Is this normal? I presume this has to be normal. Other people must also experience age discretely, rather than continuously.

BTW, I'm not entirely convinced it's a good thing that the cumulative consequence is that I do feel like I am tracking the actual chronological passing of time fairly well, as opposed to some benign delusion that I am somehow decoupled from the calendar by a magic internal preservative. Although one happy consequence, perhaps not always evident on this blog, has been large gains on the maturity front, as well as in matters of wisdom, even if there I still have a-ways to go.