What even is time?

Writing

Mar 31

Nearly every time I meet with someone, send a voice note, start a video call lately, read a newsletter, one of the first things that gets said is something about the strange sense and speed of time passing:

I can’t believe it’s already _______ (April, Spring, 2026, 6pm, etc.)
I have no idea where the time went!
It continues to surprise me how the clock ticks, how time passes, the seasons change, and spring arrives again.
What even is time?!
I no longer understand time at all…

I’m starting to wonder if maybe this not being able to understand time anymore and it not seeming to make any sense at all, is actually…okay. Maybe it’s a sign that we are shedding the need to understand time. Everything seems to be going so fast. We have driven ourselves to such extremes in efficiency, optimized our way out of really being present for the experience of living. So maybe it’s only natural that time starts to make no sense at all. They say the days are long but the years are short… but perhaps none of it is really that way anyway…

I’ve been listening to the Chronicles of Narnia with my kids, and I think it’s so interesting to think of another world existing where time is completely different than how it is in our world. A place where you step into the other mystical world and do all sorts of things, go on wild, faraway adventures, and then when you come back to the first world, no time has passed at all…

Is there a way we could release the desire to understand time and let ourselves get swept away by it, releasing ourselves into its mysterious current, letting our need to control and understand it dissolve like sandstone in water?

Perhaps we were never meant to think of time the way we have been… perhaps we are simply returning to what was always more true, that time does not make sense in any linear way, that time is in fact always shifting and changing and elongating and contracting, and the less we try to harness it, stop it, speed it up, change it, the more we allow ourselves to simply exist within it, locating the present moments and their ever evolving cycle of death and rebirth, perhaps that is when we will finally find some kind of understanding, beyond the one we have been grasping for.

Could we even go so far as to find our way to gratitude for time passing? Acknowledging the infinite miracles that it brings, changing seasons, flowers blooming, and the colors of autumn, children growing up, learning, and changing, our own growth and ability to grow and change.

I have felt so much grief at the recognition of time passing, only able to see the small and large deaths it inevitably brings. But time is also the birthplace of life. To imagine an existence without time passing is to imagine a static non-existence, where children never change, the sun never sets, the moon never rises, and we never have the gift and pleasure of witnessing the miracle of birth and death, change and impermanence.

I will never be able to hold onto the cooing sounds of my children as infants, or the size and shape of their little hands as toddlers, or the sweet way they crawl in and curl up in our bed at age six and eight. I hope and pray that there will be a time when their faces turn from children’s to adults’ and the little humans that I got to hold in my arms so many times will stand strong on their own two feet. And my heart aches at each of the tiny deaths a parent must witness in the experience of time passing, but what a miracle it is. What an absolute miracle, and one that I wouldn’t trade for anything, even the chance to hold my children as toddlers once again.