Meeting time, instead of chasing it--and the art of noticing.

some days feel endless. and yet somehow, the months slip by like they were barely here.

such a strange contradiction. living days that feel heavy, long, and full while looking back and wondering how an entire year disappeared.

Time didn’t suddenly speed up. my relationship to it changed along the way.

somewhere between the schedules, routines, and to-do lists.

when life becomes routine, the brain stops marking moments. not because they don’t matter but because they look familiar.

and familiarity compresses memory.

“The trouble is, you think you have time.”— Buddha

do we not experience time by clock anymore? is time being experienced by responsibility and repetition? by what's happening next?

as children, time was measured in seasons — summers, holidays, beginnings, endings.

as an adult, it’s measured in cycles, a rhythmic schedule of workweeks, bills, and obligations that rarely pause long enough to be noticed.

the days feel long because they’re full. The years feel short because they blur.

and maybe that’s the part worth us paying attention to.

“Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”— John Lennon

when my attention is split between screens, thoughts, and future worries, i recognize the present moment becomes thinner. like, i’m there, but not fully with it.

time feels faster when I’m always mentally ahead of myself.

stress stretches the hours and erases the weeks. my nervous system stays in “next thing” mode, and suddenly another month is gone. i'm guilty of this more often than i would like to admit and underneath it all, there’s a quiet awareness I didn’t used to have: time is finite.

each year becomes a smaller fraction of my life and my body recognizes this even when my mind doesn’t.

so i'm reminding myself that maybe the answer isn’t to slow time down. maybe it’s to simply meet it more often.

to create contrast.

to mark transitions.

to do one thing fully instead of many things halfway.

because slowness doesn't really come from having less to do does it? it comes from presence.

from noticing the ordinary before it becomes a blur we miss.

so this is my little reminder to me, to you:

time doesn’t need to be controlled. it needs to be honored.

not every moment has to be meaningful to be noticed.

that’s how time stops slipping through our hands. not by holding tighter but by holding space for just being here.

with grace,

han