Time pretends to be absolute. It puts on the disguise of seconds, minutes, and years, and makes us believe it is moving forward with mechanical honesty. The reality is, however, much more disturbing. Time is not lived but felt. And feeling never keeps time.
Time slows down when we experience sadness or grief. Minutes slowly become sentences that don’t end. One sorrowful afternoon may seem longer than a year of happiness. Misery stretches time, makes you live in it agonizingly. Time does not pass; you pass through it, gradually, with difficulty. Every hour demands something of you.
But put the same body in delight, and time is lost. Time flies away without warning. Days become memories. Joy never stretches time. It obliterates the consciousness of time. That’s how it plays with you, making you believe that time was moving forward quickly all along.
This paradox in itself is a revelation of the deception of time.
If time were truly objective, sadness and happiness wouldn’t affect how fast it feels. But they do. What we call time isn’t a fixed force so much as a mental experience, shaping itself around how we feel inside.
It is possible that time is not passing. Perhaps we are.
In moments of sadness, our sense of awareness grows smaller. Awareness turns inward. We get oversensitive to each feeling, each pain, each second. Attention delays perception. Awareness of happiness spreads out. We are not watching life anymore; we are living it. And there is no measuring in participation.
Time, then, is not a river. It is a mirror.
This is what made childhood summers endless, not due to the increased length of days, but because life was unfiltered. Curiosity filled the hours. There was no hurry to go to other places. No fixation on productivity.
Time is accelerated not due to the shortening of years, but because of how we live our daily lives. We partially live, looking forward, regretting backward, seldom living in the present.
As we cease to notice, time accelerates.
When time stretches and shrinks, many of our fears, such as aging, loss, and grief, come from how the mind relates to experience. The clock itself doesn’t hurt us. Our awareness of it does.
Two individuals may live the same hour, and come out of it with two totally different lifetimes within them.
Maybe this is why the most revolutionary moments in life usually seem eternal. Loss. Love. Creation. Trauma. These instances break the time. They do not fit well in the past or the present. They are not linear, but exist in the psyche, and can’t decay.
If time were linear, memory would get lost. But it does not. Certain moments are still vivid years later. But some years disappear without any trace.
What remains is not the duration, but our experiences.
We don’t experience time by counting days. We experience it by being in the present.
And when we know how to be fully present in ourselves, in grief or joy, time loses its power. It becomes what it always was. A useful illusion, incapable of reaching the depth of lived experience.