Time’s a funny thing: sometimes it’s flying by, other times it’s dragging its feet, and this perfectly describes the last 2 years or so of my life. The most bizarre thing, however, is the divergent ways in which we all feel it pass. It’s the same 24 hours for everybody, but it never feels this way. Days shrunk during my student era, at the approach of exams. Time slips away, like sand between my fingers. I used to wake up thinking, “God, so much to do,” and before I knew it, it was midnight, and the panic set in. I remember feeling like I was running some kind of mental marathon. Each day gone felt like one less chance to get things done. But then, when summer break hits? Time slows down again. It’s like being on this long, empty road with no deadlines in sight. That weird limbo where everything feels possible.
Now, I started working, and the lenses have changed. Now time means paychecks and project deadlines. And it is not like that same frantic countdown I felt as a student, but there’s a cycle to it: every day is this mix of meetings, emails, and work. You blink, and the week’s gone. Deadlines tighten the clock around you — kind of like a slow squeeze. But then payday arrives, and suddenly there’s a bit of breathing room.
And my parents, farmers, they work by a completely different clock: Time for them isn’t about hours or deadlines; it is all about seasons. They plant. They wait. Time moves at the Earth’s pace, not theirs. You just can’t hurry along a crop. It’ll grow when it’s ready. And honestly, there’s something pretty beautiful in that patience. Imagine knowing that no matter how much you begged otherwise, time was just going to take its course. Also, it kinda makes me want to go back home and restart my life there, but that’s a different train of thought altogether.
It’s not just our jobs that shape how we experience time, but where we live does, too. City life? Time’s always slipping away. There’s always someone hurrying somewhere, something more important to attend to, and it just feels as though there’s never enough time to get everything done. I remember being a college kid, watching people rush at the traffic lights around 8–9 am and thinking, ‘What’s the hurry?’ Now I’m one of them. But in a small town? Every day is longer. It seems like time moves more slowly not because it really does, but nobody’s in a rush to get anywhere. I’ve felt it whenever I get out of the city — like there are suddenly more hours in a day even though the clock’s ticking just the same. The sunrises are long and the sunsets are even longer.
Then there’s culture. In some places, being on time is everything e.g., Japan. Every minute is accounted for. But in others? The sense of time is more fluid. People take their time over things — conversations, meals, even turning up to events. The clock doesn’t dictate their lives in the same way. Time isn’t some universal force of which we all have the same experience. Okay, we all share the same hours, but those hours feel different for each of us. It’s how we live within time that makes all the difference. Happiness may pass in a wink, but a meeting laced with stress may take an eternity. Silly as it sounds, we mould time with how much emotional weight we give it.
I think about it a lot — how time, though objective, can be deeply personal. Students counting down to finals, professionals by deadlines, farmers by harvests — each living through the same minutes and hours, each feeling the time so differently. It’s something that gets me thinking: how do we get better at living within time instead of always feeling like it’s working against us? I don’t know the answer, but I do know this — our relationship with time changes. What dragged on when we were young flies by now. The stress we once put on deadlines starts to loosen as we begin to realize how minuscule they were in the big picture. Time won’t speed up or slow down, but maybe how you feel about it will. Time just is. It is what we do with it that really counts. Or doesn’t. Depends on how you see it.
