While you are reading this sentence, seconds of life are passing by. Around the world and in the universe, time is ticking by. No matter what we do or what we wish for, it stops for no one. Time is something that you experience from the moment you are born until eternity because there is no way to not experience it.

It is hard to put into words the concept of time and what it means to travel through it because it is something that we do constantly. We try to rationalize time with clocks, watches, and units like hours and seconds, but there are few rational reasons to create a unit out of time. Bounds like twenty four hours in a day and 365 days in a year are simply arbitrary measurements of the movement of Earth and the sun rather than the amount of time that is passing.

It is strange to feel yourself moving through time or to stop and think about it for a minute — using “a minute” for lack of any other way to describe it — because there is no way to harness time, to capture it. Humans in nature are always attempting to harness their environment but you will never grasp time in your hands. I often struggle with this idea of just passing through time and it is even harder to accept when realizing that time is finite. 

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I felt this realization of time very strongly when I was in high school theatre in the show “Our Town.” “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it … every, every minute?” says Emily Webb in the show. Most of my thoughts around time started with this seed and expanded to the large web of branches that encompasses my mind now. 

This show had a profound effect on me and the exact moment where I really connected with this idea was during the final performance of the show where my character — Stage Manager — ends the show with “Eleven o’clock in Grover’s Corners. You get a good rest, too. Good night,” I said to the audience. In those few moments, from me standing on that stage holding my pocket watch saying that line to when I had walked into the wings followed by applause, I truly noticed time. 

Every person on this earth only has so much time that they can use for whatever they choose, and far too often our time gets caught up in things that we don’t actually want to be spending it on. People don’t notice life or time, letting them just flow by. However, every moment when you live and experience the simplicities of life there is so much more that happens than you even realize. 

In today’s fast-paced world, the perception of time seems to be nearly invisible. It is so easy to get caught up in school, work and scrolling through TikTok that nothing feels truly present anymore. The only visualizations of time left are the Google Calendar and WebReg schedules that students keep to a tee that — while impressive — make each passing day happen; begin and end with no notice of it. 

I am not unique in these ideas or the first one to have them. A lot of people have a mindset that they just have to get through this semester to get to break. That future milestone is then replaced with internships, and then when they get through enough semesters they graduate. Then it is the same concept again but with a new job instead. In an attempt to get through life and make the most of it, we can ironically end up losing most of it. 

It is not a matter of dropping classes or doing less — I would be extremely hypocritical if that was my argument, with 18 units every semester — but rather it is the idea of doing all these things while fostering appreciation for them. 

Just because you are spending your time not in a meditative state through yoga or silence does not mean that you are wasting your time — though if it works for you even better —  so long as you acknowledge that is how you want to use it. 

One way that I have found to notice time is, as basic as it seems, to just actively notice it, think about it. Also, while I may have bashed clocks earlier, they can be helpful. The ticking sound of a physical clock or just a watch on your wrist that you can associate with the concept of time rather than just the measurement of it is a really useful reminder. I’ve found an analog watch to be powerful.

Slowing down to notice life and be present in it is what allows for a fulfilled life. Being alive and noticing time in whatever paradoxical way works for you could be all that is needed to really live life in a more fulfilling way. Of course, it is impossible to always notice time, but even just increasing your awareness for the present moment by a bit is very potent.

So, if people can just see life and experience time a little more in their daily life they will see each other, see themselves and see existence as such a gift or as some might say, a present — pun intended.