Dear Time

Dear Time, I’m not sure you know what we’ve done to you. We have found ways to count you. Some are practical and some are inventions of capitalism. Birthdays and billable hours. Sleep scores and screen time. In flights boarded, emails answered, rings closed, and minutes saved. We wear you on our wrists. We let you buzz against our skin to remind us that we’re late, behind, overdue, underperforming. We have turned you into a metric, a scoreboard, a thing to optimize. We built an entire world to help us save you. And here I am feeling like all I am doing is running out of you. It hit me last night that we, the scholars and technicians of the West, live differently than a lot of the world. Years ago, I was in a remote village in Nepal where almost no one uses calendars. Heck, they don’t even use money. There were no birthday reminders. No watches buzzing wrists. No notifications telling people they were behind. Time there did not arrive in alerts or deadlines. You, Time, arrive as weather. As harvest, as death, as a child’s growth. I’m in this village with a small team. Our cameras are big, they look like machine guns and I didn’t realize what that might do to a person in a village a 12 hour drive from the nearest city. My director of photography is taking b-roll and a village sticks his hands up like we’re trying to arrest him. I met a man who looked to be 90. I asked him how old he was. He paused. He said, “I think I’m 50.” Then I asked him what message he wanted to write on his skin. He wrote: My life is happy until the end. That sentence has stayed with me for years because it exposed something in me that I’m still trying to understand. Here was a man who had likely known more hardship, more uncertainty, and more discomfort than most people I know. And yet, standing in front of me, he seemed less afraid of life than many of us who have built our entire worlds around comfort. That’s what Brooks meant in The Shawshank Redemption when he said, “The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.” He wasn’t just talking about speed. He was talking about what happens when convenience becomes our default setting. When we start mistaking ease for peace. When friction starts to feel like failure. When we build lives so efficient that there is no room left for wonder. But friction is where life happens. The hard phone call you’ve been avoiding. The dinner that takes too long. The walk instead of the scroll. The trip you almost skip. The apology you’ve been rehearsing in your head. The extra ten minutes on the porch when the light is just right. That’s where stories come from. Not from managing time better. From spending it better. So this week, I’m trying something simple. I’m going to stop asking, how do I save time? And start asking, how do I make my life happy? Write your future, Robert PS: Want to forward or share this story to someone who might need it? Use the same link: https://stories.dearworld.com/book/dear-time