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First, as @DPT said, you need to distinguish between your book's subjective and objective chronology. In real life, we don't experience real life as a steady progression of time. Ten years can pass in a blink of an eye, and a single day can last forever. The same is true in fiction. There are books that spend fifty pages on a single hour's worth of events, and then pass over a year with a line of stars. There's yet another level of this available to us as writers, in as much as the reader's time and the character's time are always going to be different. So things that drag on for the character can be dismissed in a single line by the author, on behalf of the reader.
The combination of these factors give us a great deal of control over pace. So how should we use it? First, elide spans of time where nothing of interest happens (to the narrative, the reader or the character) no matter how long those spans of time are. "Ten long years dragged by, each minute an agony." You can give a sense of the timespan's full length, but you don't want to make the reader experience it in real time.
Next, slow the pace down when things that are interesting or important are going on, or when the character (or reader) needs some time to let the full emotional impact of something sink in. You can do this by paying closer attention to details. "The coffee cup slid off the counter, and seemed to hang there, frozen a moment in the air, before it plummeted to the ground. He dashed desperately to rescue it, but was only just in time to be splashed by hot coffee, as the cup exploded into tiny porcelain shards." That just took longer than ten years. If your book feels breathless and overpacked, it's probably not because events are objectively happening at an unrealistic pace, but because you aren't giving each event the attention it demands.
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