Time Passes

it is almost April but didn't we, only yesterday, wish each other a happy new year?

I write this in rebellion against my to-do list. It is night but daylight still lingers by the window. Waves after waves of exhaustion crash upon the walls of my mind. Outside, the trees are returning to bloom, green leaves sprouting upon branches, flowers budding in splendid orange, yellow, and violet hues. Only three months ago and these trees were log-like, winter licking life off their stems. Now they blossom, now they respire. Now their leaves converge into tents that offer shade to wearied legs looking to gather breath for the next phase of the journey.

A few days ago, after my last class for the week, I said to myself that I would maximise the long weekend, that I would give Friday and Saturday—especially Saturday—to completing pending assignments, reading, and fulfilling other tasks on my to-do list. I said I would enter Sunday evening relaxed about the new week. And I tried. I tried. I got up early on both days, I cut down screen time as much as I could, I skipped my plan to watch a couple of football matches. I even missed a couple of basketball games.

Yet, time passes. Time passes and we watch her slip into the sand, watch her vapors blend into the mist of night.

I’m now left with a few hours of the weekend and a long list of things to tackle. Except the night stands still, and my eyes resist the lull of sleep, I am not marking all items as done before tomorrow morning. I have about 110 pages of a novel to still read for class, having read 35 pages between yesterday and now. It seems I could have read more, but I really can’t pinpoint where all the hours went.

At the library earlier today, I began to feel a buildup of anxiety, a tightening crawling across the crevices of my chest. It was a familiar grip. In February, I woke up one Wednesday and felt a panic clutch my neck. I could not gather myself. I attempted to. I sat down with the book I was to read for class and everything bounced off a stalwart barricade that this panic had constructed within the clavicles of my mind. For minutes I stared at the pages, waiting for that flash of awareness, but nothing clicked. Moving towards a sob, I texted a couple of loved ones and told them it felt like a drowning was happening. Thank God for loved ones. Thank God for His mercy. It took hours. It took a walk despite being pressed for time. But eventually, everything calmed.

When that grip reached for me this time around, I knew what it was. This time though, there’s no drowning. I reminded myself that, just as that week and its long list of tasks passed, this, too, will pass. Perhaps because now I can see the end of the semester being weeks away. Perhaps because I’d faced this feeling once this semester. Regardless, I figured I would be fine. In fact, that’s when I decided I’d write another ‘Stack—I had given it some thought this past week, but that moment at the library yielded a resolution. Even if my to-do list suggests I should be doing something else.

reading The Years of Blood again because it’s that book!

That moment also prompted me to think about something else: time passing. Does it seem that this decade the days fly by faster than we can track? Just recently we were preparing for the new normal, adapting to a post-lockdown society. That was over five years ago. There are people who will say that those five years are a blur. I remember the first time I returned to my undergrad university after the lockdown. It’s been more than half a decade since that return trip. Does it seem like the years are in a haste towards a future we can’t even fully flesh on the page?

In one of the novels we read for class, To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf titled the second section “Time Passes”. This titling is notable because the first section of the novel, spanning more than half of the book, happens in a day. Then we move into the second section, taking up only thirteen pages, takes place across ten years. One decade. That’s a fascinating juxtaposition of the concept of time: to expand and stretch a day’s event into about 90 pages, and to compress the events of one decade into that short section. Since reading this novel—which I’m not writing about because I’d need to sit and reread it and the schedule for the next few weeks won’t make room for that—the concept of time has idled in my mind.

What does it mean for time to pass? How do we measure the passage of time? Unlike a color that we register by our visual senses, or a sound that our brain processes through our ears, what are the objective ways through which we measure how time has passed?

When we sit in a tedious or laborious meeting at work, one hour stretches. One hour is torture. But when we catchup with long-term friends after a year of not seeing, lunchtime spills into dinnertime and it feels like we’ve only been with them for a minute. Does that imply then that time moves by based on our experiences within it? That wouldn’t be a holistic simplification.

Because the truth is, whether a boring day or an adventurous one, the sun rises and sets and a day goes by. That is the objective tracking of time, one decides centuries ago and measured by the relentless tick of the second hour of a clock. Yet within that objective movement exists our subjective interpretation of it.

This is why persuasive arguments about time resonate with us. Statements like, “There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen.” Because we are aware of the objective interpretations of weeks and decades, but we also recognise the individual perceptions of these measurements.

A newly-wedded bride will recall her wedding day as the sweetest, perhaps longest day and night of her year. Yet for another woman, of the same age, who was put on probation at work and then sat in repeated stakeholder meetings, that day probably crawled by.

In these subjectivities, these abstract experiences, the world still moves by the second. Birthdays happen. Weekends come and go. Deadlines are set and then extended. This morning I realised I missed a deadline, even though I noted the application. It was due for Wednesday but in the blur of the week, I’d missed it. This doesn’t mean the week didn’t fly by. It did. Yet each day was its own thing, in the eye of the world. Two days ago I sat with the draft of a poem for an hour, groaning at intervals because the words I was reaching for were appearing elusive. Eventually, because I had other things to catch up to, I let the draft sit. It felt like only a few minutes had moved on.

But it was an hour.

This is what we constantly have to figure out: the movement of time within our frame of perception against the movement of time as the world tracks it. I don’t suppose there is a resolution to it as long as we are in this world.

But, perhaps, we can try for one.

PS. I want to give some time to reading about time, but that would be when the semester ends. It also feels like I’m growing a list of things to do over summer, as though summer will last for a century. That’s how it feels though. Summer, lasting forever.

PS. This post is unedited. All typos are mine! The rest is for you, dearest reader.