There never seems to be enough time to do anything. Enough time to live. Enough time to enjoy the moment. Enough time to breathe. Time is always slipping through my fingers, like grains of sand. I’ve lived with time always battling against me.

“Time is the most precious resource”

– Emmaline Soken Huberty

I don’t see it that way. With every passing day, my resentment increases. I resent my lifestyle. Wake up. Go to school. Sleep. Repeat. Every single day for the rest of my life. It’s funny that time is always passing, but It feels like I’m stuck in the same place, not being able to move forward and progress in life,  like the overwhelming feeling of drowning in the sand of an hourglass. I’m sick of this baseless thing called “time.”

I constantly compare myself to those influencers who are always on top of it, in perfect control of their life and never wasting a minute of time. I find myself longing for a life I know that I will never achieve. I want to wake up when it is noon and have an afternoon jog to clear my mind. I want to be satisfied with the life that I am living. I want to be happy. But time says no. Almost subconsciously, I weigh myself with countless responsibilities, like birdshot on my back. I spend hours and hours hacking at these chores everyday- but every so often, I ask myself “Why am I even doing all of this?” I ponder and ponder but I never get an answer to my question. Still, with no sense of purpose or goal I continue to fulfill these duties I’ve created for myself.

I can’t help my overwhelming thoughts of life and the pressure of my unattainable goals, from crashing down upon me. I can’t help but look in admiration at the life that I can’t live versus the life that I am currently living.

With the passing of time, I feel a sense of great pressure, sadness and regret. Pressure that I haven’t achieved what I wanted to, sadness that I am not yet standing at the peak of these unattainable standards that I have made for myself. And regret knowing that I have been wasting time for the past 15 years.

Time will go so fast. So fast that even if I run and run with all my might, it is impossible to get back the time that I have lost. I wish that time would just wait for me, I wish that time can just stand still while I can take my mind off the constant fight for my life- my battle with time. I wish to get rid of the feeling to achieve a certain something, even though I have no clue what “something” exactly is. However, I know that with every minute and second, time is still passing. What is time to me?

Time is something that everyone has a different definition of. People can say that time is only a social construct, made by our minds. And we have physicists like Sean Carroll saying that time can lead back all the way to the start of the universe.

“Yes. There’s still time….It’s just that events that happen in that empty universe don’t have causality, don’t have memory, don’t have progress and don’t have aging or metabolism or anything like that. It’s just random fluctuations.”

– Physicist Sean Carroll

But that definition of time is far too complicated for me. For me, time is something that leads up to the future, but looks back into the past. Time is something that is determined by my own personal events, and my own personal milestones. And time is self-reflecting. it is looking into the future to see where my actions would lead me, or looking back into my past, to try and relive my favorite moments. It has been a long journey, but I’ve learned to be ok with the passing of time. I’ve learned to embrace every minute and second that goes by, even if it’s not beneficial to me in any specific way. Time is no longer a reason to invalidate myself, but it is now a reason to be proud of myself. Proud that I no longer crave the validation of being productive, proud that I’ve come to accept that lazy days are ok. And most importantly, time is a reason to look forward to the next day. Time is the reason I can relive sunrises and sunsets, time is the reason I am able to relive the best moments with the people I love, and because of time, will life move on.