Framing time

Time has always fascinated me. It’s this strange thing —always there, always slipping away. Since I was a kid, I’ve tried to get on top of it. My sister and I had these hyper-organized mornings, planning everything down to the minute: wake up at 7:30, wash face by 7:32, breakfast exactly at 7:40. It wasn’t so much a challenge as it was a routine, a way to tame the day before it even began.

That obsession has stuck with me as I’ve grown up. I’ve downloaded virtually every time management app out there, convinced that the next one would finally be the one to help me get it all together. I’ve read books, tried systems, even built spreadsheets. I find beautiful things like capturing a 'life in weeks', inspired by Tim Urban’s deeply simple idea —seeing it all from above, boxed into neat little squares representing my finite time on this planet. It’s sobering and stimulating at the same time. A memento mori of sorts, if you will.

Then there’s the other side of me. The part that resonates with the Zen notion that time isn’t real —at least not in the way we think of it, with our clocks and calendars. Zen invites us to live fully in the present, to let go of schedules and all the ways we try to pin down the infinite. When I manage to let go, even briefly, it feels like stepping into another world. Whether I’m meditating, quietly savouring a good cup of coffee, or wandering without a destination, in those moments I feel present, like I’m finally touching something real.

Yet I still love my calendar and time-boxing. They’re the scaffolding that lets me create and protect those fleeting moments of presence. In that tension between structure and flow is where real magic happens. It’s where the visible meets the invisible, where the practical meets the profound, where time makes sense and becomes space.

After all, time isn’t something we conquer or escape, it’s something we inhabit. It shapes us even as we try to shape it. Maybe the answer isn’t to figure it out but to simply live with it. To embrace the contradiction. To flow with it. In the end, only time will tell.