Time… We think we know time… It is the ticking of the clock on the wall, the routine chime of a bell that signals the hour, something linear, a string of moments that tether our days together, shaping them into a neat chronology of what has been and what will be. It is the way we measure growth, decay, progress, and delay. Our calendars, deadlines, and birthdays tell us time is a ruler, firm, unyielding, pushing us forward whether we are ready or not. We’ve built entire civilizations around it, structuring our lives according to its rhythms. The hours dictate when we wake, when we work, when we rest, so in our pursuit of control, we invented clocks and watches, mechanisms to capture time in our hands, to always keep track of it, to enslave it to our schedules. We divide our existence into minutes and seconds, trying to master it, and we trust it to stay obedient, to move as expected, because without that certainty, we would unravel.
But what if time is not the slave we’ve made it out to be? What if time is not a sequence but an ocean, vast and indifferent to our attempts to tame it? Have you ever noticed how a single moment of joy can stretch, and how an hour of grief can feel like eternity? It seems time is able to bend, to warp. It refuses to be pinned down by our clocks. We speak of time as a commodity. We save it, spend it, waste it, but does it belong to us at all? What if we are the ones swept along by its currents, grasping for permanence in a world that is constantly shifting?
Look at the night sky, where light from distant stars reaches us after travelling for millions of years. We see them now, as they were before we were born, as they were when ancient civilizations first gazed upward. The stars are both present and long gone. What does this tell us about time? That it might be an illusion, a trick of perception, a veil over something deeper, something we have yet to fully understand. Einstein once said, “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” If we truly reflect on this, we begin to unravel the fabric we’ve taken for granted. Time does not move forward, it simply is. It exists not in lines but in layers, a spiral, constantly circling back on itself, holding past, present, and future in a single breath.
When we dream, time is neither fast nor slow. We can relive a lifetime in the blink of an eye or stretch a second into what feels like hours. In meditation, the concept of time can dissolve entirely in the stillness of deep reflection. It is in these moments we touch something timeless, something eternal. And maybe, in this quiet place beyond time, we see what has been hidden all along: that life is not about racing against the clock, not about winning the battle with time, but about experiencing the fullness of each moment as it comes, untethered by the past, unburdened by the future.
What, then, is time? Perhaps time is simply the canvas upon which we paint our existence, but it is neither the artist nor the brush. The more we try to understand it, the more it slips through our fingers, reminding us that we are chasing shadows. We search for time’s meaning, but maybe its only meaning is the one we give it in the moments we choose to live.
In the end, time is not a race, punishment, or force to be feared. Time is a silent witness. It waits for no one, but it does not rush. It neither condemns nor celebrates. It is simply there, like the wind, like the sea, an invisible current moving through and around us, and the final truth, the one that lingers long after the clocks stop ticking is that in trying to master it, we’ve become its slaves, pacing our lives to its unrelenting tick.
Time, does not belong to us. We belong to time! And in recognizing that belonging, we are freed from the need to conquer it. We are here, now, in this moment, this breath, in this heartbeat, and nothing else matters. Because in this fleeting instant, we are… eternal!