All You Have Is Time

We like to say these things about time:

I’m just killing time.
I’ve got nothing but time.
I never have enough time.
Time is money.
You’re wasting my time, or I don’t want to waste time.
Time doesn’t exist, or There’s no such thing as time.
I spent all day on that.
The week flew by.
Where did the time go?
Manage your time better.
Take your time.

We don’t talk about how people interpret time. One person can’t grasp time and is always late. Another person feels time painfully, minute by minute. Some of us can plan five years in advance; some of us can’t plan a week in advance. One person says that ten minutes feels like 20 minutes, another person feels like 10 minutes is five. Whole lifetimes pass within hours on psychedelics. Minutes take eternities to pass when waiting.

We have different cultural interpretations of time. I recently went on vacation with my multi-cultural family. The Dominicans have a loose interpretation of time, things oozing from one thing into another without any real need to manage time expectations. The Russians have the most generous interpretation of time, thinking one can accomplish two hours worth of activities in 45 minutes. The Americans were just trying to hold on.

Time can be measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millenia, eons. But it can also be measured in breaths, laughter, heartbeats, in the swoop and arc of planets and stars, in layers of rock and strata.

I always experience time moving like a speeding train around the equinoxes, spring and fall. July and August are glacially slow, but as soon as September hits, we are slingshotting around the parabola of Earth’s trajectory. Similarly, January and February move like molasses in winter, and then March starts the experience all over again.

Some live entirely in the past, transfixed by memories and trauma that won’t let them leave. Some live entirely in the now. Some live entirely in the future of possibilities. Some believe we are living past, present, future all at once, that they are all collapsed on top of one another.

Living in the now is touted as the golden ideal, the way to be. Meditation is supposed to get us to this “present moment” awareness. And yet, we can get stuck in adhering to the present moment and never live into the future we envision or want for ourselves by following an endless trail of breadcrumbs of now. Or we might stay tuned into the now as a way of avoiding the past.

What are those moments where we suddenly glimpse future plans gone awry, or the future death of a loved one, but a folding of time? Or a momentary rupture in time that lets us see something that has not yet happened in this time and place?

Indigenous traditions around the world don’t separate space from time. They exist together. In my healing tradition, we use the Quechua word pacha, which translates roughly to spacetime, meaning the one doesn’t exist without the other. Time is intrinsically tied to place, place is intrinsically related to time.

Einstein said: Space and time are woven together into a single four-dimensional continuum. You can’t talk about where something is without also talking about when — and vice versa. They are inseparable.

In Meditations on the Tarot, the anonymous mystic author writes about space+time as denoting the original equidistant cross (+), with time being the horizontal line and space/place being the vertical line.

We do not account for how place changes time. Time is measured as moving faster on mountains and slower at sea level. Satellites experience a weaker pull of time due to less gravity. The faster you move, the slower your time runs relative to someone sitting still. Time is not fixed… it’s local.

All the old stories start by addressing time, and sometimes place.

Once upon a time…
Long ago, in time out of mind, in a place far away…

Stories use time to denote change, like a movie montage:

He wandered for 40 days and 40 nights…
She toiled for three days and three nights…
For a year and a day, she lived with the Tuatha Dé Danann…

Story does not work without time. Time is implicit in narrative. A narrative cannot move, change, evolve, grow, or die without time explicitly woven in.

You are the ground, the land, out of which your personal story arises.

Time is not just local, it’s local to you. Ask someone to tell you a story about an event that happened. Then asked them when. Some will say March 21, 2015. Some will say “When I was 25.” Some will say my child was one years old. Some will say it was winter, or there was snow on the ground. Some will say my mother hadn’t died yet, or I still lived in California. Time described is often relative to huge time markers in their lives.

As intrinsic as time is to place, we don’t think about place when we think about the time. Does time move slower for you in traffic, on the hot highway with the late afternoon sun streaming through the window? Does time move slower for you at a cabin with your friends on a lazy weekend? Does time fly (or vanish) when you are in flow, working on something that draws all of you into it?

When you talk about time, why don’t you also talk about place? If you say “I don’t have time,” do you also say “I don’t have place”?

Some people believe we are time. That we are nodes of crystallized space time. Some believe that what we call a person is a continuity illusion across spacetime, that our bodies are temporary ground from which time arises.

In his book, Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman uses Heidegger to illustrate that we can’t “manage” time because we are not separate from it. The entire concept of managing time requires us to think that we are separate from it, that we can master it (or fail at doing so). However, if we are time, we cannot stand outside of it and dominate it.

But if you are time — if your life is experienced in the moments you inhabit — then the question isn't how to optimize your hours but how to actually be in them. You can't hoard time for some future payoff. There is no outside vantage point from which to manage the thing you're made of.

In a vision once, I was frustrated and explaining to a guide that I had no time to do anything. She looked at me and said, rather impatiently I might add, “All you have is time.”

Greek philosopher Heraclitus said: “You cannot step into the same river twice.”

Time changes all. We think we can go back to a feeling or an experience, or a sense of self, that we experienced in another time and place. But there is no actually going back. People say, “If I can just get back to feeling the way I felt…” It will never happen. That kind of wishful thinking keeps us stuck chasing a space+time that is gone.

We can imagine and revisit memories and experience them again from where we sit in the now, but we are still bound to return to the space+time in which our meatsuit (our body) lives.

Your home is a space+time, distinct from all others. The objects in it have moved across space+times to arrive in your home, and will one day move out of it. What is a home without those objects?

I recently dealt with my mother’s things. All of those objects call to mind different space+times: her childhood in Maine, her career as a nurse, my childhood in Minnesota and Spain and Brazil, her stroke. Some of those objects pull me back to time-memories that are welcome; some time-memories are less so. When we hold on to objects, we hold on to remnants of space+time.

I can tell you from experience doing healing work in other people’s homes: stuff picks up energy just like humans do. Just because you get rid of the objects that remind you of certain space+times, doesn’t mean the object got rid of you (and your energy).

Simone Weil wrote: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” The space+time (home) we choose and then create for ourselves is the place in which we are rooted.

Your body exists in this space+time. It cannot leave the space+time in which you sit reading this post; your cells and muscles and blood and bones are tied to this moment in space+time.* But your mind can travel to all kinds of different timelines and dimensions through your imagination, memory, past lives, not to mention through the internet, through books, through pictures and art. If you’re lucky, you can travel through your ancestor’s eyes, through your dreams, through your intuition, through the blessings of your guides. Your mind is not bound to space+time.

We shape every space+time we touch, and it shapes us back, long after we’ve let go of it. It’s not that time is scarce, or that we are powerless to it, or that it is some kind of outside force separate from us. It might be the one thing we actually possess. We don’t get to stand outside of it and run it; we only get to decide what we leave in it.

* Yes, some say Jesus, Yogananda, etc. can travel with their bodies. And I believe them. Most of us are not at that level of attainment, so I’m speaking to the rest of us.

Author’s note on AI: This piece was entirely written by a human author, with a few fact checks from Claude.

Sara Stibitz is a mother, writer, healer, and author of Writing on Purpose. Sara helps people find and reshape the stories they’re telling about their lives.

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Thank you for reading!

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