The other day I was talking to someone on the phone and he commented, “Boy, this year has gone by fast.”

Thinking about it, it has.

Saturday will be the autumnal equinox, also known as the first day of fall; a time when the weather is supposed to begin getting cooler (except in the south) and the days shorter. It seems like just yesterday people were gathering at the pools and the beaches to relax. That the short pants were brought out and the coats and sweaters put in storage. Now, it won’t be long before we’ll be pulling them back out.

I remember reading one time that the days go by faster as we age. I’m guessing that’s true, seeing as how summer was somehow a blur, and the only thing reminding us of the season is the prolonged warm weather that is the norm for every state south of Kentucky, although I guess Kentucky, because it residents always seem to identify more with the south than the north, can join our little coalition.

But I wonder what causes the phenomenon of time flying by. Does it really fly by? Or does it just seem like it because we’re so caught up in our daily activities that we don’t take time to let it drag by.

Time flying by wasn’t a problem when we were younger. Remember sitting in a classroom — whether in elementary school, or high school, or college, and time just seemed to stand still? You kept checking your watch, or the clock on the wall, hoping the class, or the day, would end and those hands never seemed to move.

I find myself getting like that while covering long meetings, especially if I have another assignment following.

But most of the time, things seem to go so quickly. It’s like the changing scenes in an old movie where one minute a character is a certain age, and the next minute you see a flurry of calendar pages flipping by and the character has changed in age. Or the hourglass used to make time transitions in “Scrooge,” the 1950s English version of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” that keeps spinning and the sand falling.

I sit back sometimes and think back to the past, and it’s hard to realize that so many things have flown by. It seems like yesterday we brought my now-grown daughter home from the hospital or that she started her first day of school. That my goddaughter is now the mother of a son and I’m a great-uncle. And it’s hard to imagine my wife and I have been married 44 years (that’s not a criticism; each year has been wonderful).

So I guess when you take the time to really think about it, time is flying by and it’s all a part of that human activity they call aging. And before I end up going to that big newsroom in the sky, I hope to be able to slow it down again.

John Surratt is a staff writer at The Vicksburg Post. You may reach him at john.surratt@vicksburgpost.com.