Time Doesn’t Care About You
Of all the one-sided relationships you’ve ever had, none are more lopsided than the one you have with time.
Time Doesn’t Care About You.
Of all the one-sided relationships you’ve ever had, none are more lopsided than the one you have with time.
For some reason I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately.
We mark everything with it. Birthdays. Deaths. Anniversaries. We count down to it, race against it, waste it, mourn it. We set alarms for it, build calendars around it, and spend actual money trying to manage it. There are thousands of books on that alone. Thousands. We even microwave our food by it. Seventy-three seconds for a gas station burrito, because sixty wasn’t enough and ninety was too many. And none of it mattered because the thing was still frozen in the middle. Time is embedded in every corner of our lives, woven into the language we use before we even think about it. How long will that take? Do we have time? I don’t have time for this.
And through all of it, every alarm, every deadline, every birthday candle, time hasn’t once looked up.
Time doesn’t just ignore you. It doesn’t even behave the same way everywhere. Time bends. It slows down around massive objects. It moves differently depending on how fast you’re traveling. The clock on a GPS satellite runs slightly faster than the one on your phone because it’s farther from Earth’s gravitational pull. They have to actually correct for it, or your navigation would be off by miles. We built technology sophisticated enough to compensate for the fact that time itself is inconsistent. And still, not once, has time acknowledged the effort.
Sometimes I intentionally slow my shutter down to capture movement in a still frame. And as much as anyone loves a clean, sharp image, that’s not what’s actually happening around us. Everything is always in motion, always passing. Freezing a frame is a little like telling a lie. The blur is the truth.
And then there’s the proof that removes all doubt.
When my dad died, time didn’t stop. It didn’t slow down, or pause out of respect, or even flinch. The sun came up the next morning exactly the way it had for the 26,298 times it did for my dad. I remember thinking, how is any of this still happening? The world felt like it should have at least stumbled. It didn’t. It just kept going, completely unbothered by the most important thing that had ever happened to me.
57 days. That’s how long my dad fought to stay, from the moment he came home from the hospital to the moment he didn’t. And when it was over, time moved on. And so did I, even though I wanted it to stop. Just for a second.
That’s just what indifference looks like up close.
So what do we do with that?
We can’t manage time. Not really. Every book ever written about it is lying to you a little. What we manage is ourselves. Our attention. Our choices. What we decide is worth the seconds we’re spending. That’s it. That’s the whole game. Time doesn’t care if you spend it doing something that matters or something that doesn’t. It’s going to keep moving either way, at its own pace, on its own terms, completely indifferent to whether you showed up for your life or sleepwalked through it.
The only vote you get is how you spend it. Time doesn’t care about that either. But you do. And maybe that’s the whole point.
I’m not writing this from a yoga retreat or the back of a self help book. I’m writing it from the other side of enough loss to know that time doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It doesn’t wait for you to heal, or figure it out, or finally start living the way you always meant to.
The past is a place worth visiting. Just don’t set up camp there. The future is worth planning for. Just know that the only thing you can be certain about is that it won’t look anything like what you planned. Because right now is the only place time and you actually exist together. Not in the replay. Not in the worry. Here.
Not another app, not another book, not another system for squeezing more out of your day. Just the quiet, almost rebellious decision to be in the moment you’re actually standing in. That’s my take anyway. Time doesn’t care. But you still get to decide what you do with it.
Time doesn’t care about any of this. It never did. It never will.
But if you woke up early this morning trying to get more of it. That’s not sad. That’s kind of beautiful.
