One of the reasons I've always been fascinated by extremely old people is my sheer awe at the idea of having such a long memory. Like, there are some people who can actually remember a full hundred years. A very few of them are out there that remember a full hundred and ten years! I've always enjoyed stretching my mind to imagine how it would be for one's remembered experiences to encompass that length of time.
But at the same time, there's a flip side which I've appreciated less, which is that there's something incredible about the experience of very young people too, and this I should be able to wrap my mind around since I once was very young. I'm talking, not babies or toddlers, but kids just old enough not only to be forming memories but to have a stable sense of time and how long certain measurements of time take. Take a nine-year-old, for instance; they are a fully aware human with perspective about time and a very concrete and stable understanding of how long a year takes, for instance (even if each passing year still feels shorter and shorter at that age). And yet, this nine-year-old has experienced only a handful of them ever, and even fewer of those spans of time are fully placed in their memory, even if they can fully wrap their mind around each one of them.
I suppose this isn't any deeper insight than contemplating the fact that I have a firm feeling for what a half-decade is (although less of a firm feeling: half-decades aren't marked by a cycle of life circumstances and events the way years are) and I've only experienced a handful of those. But still, there's something a little mind-bending about contemplating the perpetual mental state of someone who experiences a coherent notion of time and the past and memories but for whom the length of time in their past is so brief.
