"It goes by so fast"
You hear it when you're younger, from so many different sources...maybe you read it in a biography, hear it spoken as a line in a show, or maybe even being said to you by a parent or grandparent or teacher or coach.
"It" being life.
For me, the first I can recall the confusing speed of life being mentioned as an immutable fact of life and carrying any weight at all was the first time I read Vonnegut's Slaughter House Five. Billy Pilgrim's predicament and how he learns to accept it - time itself not being the problem but our perspective of events and how we react to them is - that sparked a little something inside me, made me actually ponder the limits of a lifespan and what to do with the moments at hand.
But of course me being easily distracted (squirrel!), I would go on from contemplation of that and it being significant, to forgetting it entirely for months, sometimes years at a span.
The thing is (as I gather most people grow to realise) that it's not until you go through whatever cycle you have to go through, be it pleasant or otherwise, that you realise that's all you get for and from those moments.
A lot of people I know that came of age during the '80's, or caught up with those who came of age during the '80's by immersing themselves in that decades music or literature or cinema - especially the cinema - have embraced the words written by the late John Hughes that the cavelier character of Ferris Bueller (portrayed marvelously by Matthew Broderick) states at the end of the film; you know it, the simple but poignant "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it." adage.
You hear it or read it or think it so many times for years on end until finally the day comes when you do indeed stop and look around and say to yourself, "damn, that was a quick sixty years (or whatever number you are currently experiencing).
And then you say, as everyone does as if it's programed in our universal mind, "Where did the time go?'
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