You Don’t Need More Time. You Need More Presence.

Tbh I want to say I have a writers block rn

I’m writing but I’m not just posting

It was movie marathon Friday.

Today I’ve watched Entergalactic, an episode of The Mentalist, Anastasia, Down with Love, and now I’m finishing About Time.

Out of everything I’ve watched today, About Time is the one that’s going to stay with me.

On the surface, it’s about a man whose family can travel back in time. He uses it the way most of us probably would at first—to fix awkward conversations, say the right thing, undo embarrassing moments, and try again.

But somewhere along the way, the film quietly stops being about time travel.

It becomes about ordinary life.

That’s what surprised me the most.

Nothing about this family feels extraordinary. They laugh, they eat together, they argue, they love each other. Their home feels lived in. Their conversations feel familiar. It feels like the kind of life someone you know could actually be living.

There’s one rule in the film that I found especially heartbreaking. Once a child is born, going back to a point before that birth risks changing the child forever. So there are some moments you simply cannot revisit.

You don’t get unlimited do-overs.

When Tim’s father dies, he keeps going back to spend a little more time with him. Those scenes absolutely broke me. I don’t even have the kind of relationship with my own father that would make those moments personally relatable, but somehow they still felt incredibly close to my heart.

Maybe because they weren’t really about losing a father.

They were about wishing we had just one more ordinary day with someone we love.

What stayed with me even more wasn’t the time travel.

It was the realization that the happiest version of Tim eventually stops using it.

He learns that the secret isn’t fixing every mistake. It’s living each day so fully that you don’t need to go back and relive it.

That hit me harder than I expected.

I spend so much time thinking about the future. Planning it. Worrying about it. Trying to make everything perfect before I’ve even lived it.

I’m always mentally somewhere else.

The next goal.

The next opportunity.

The next version of myself.

And in doing that, I think I’ve been rushing past my own life.

I’ve been so focused on where I’m going that I’ve forgotten to notice where I already am.

The awkward conversations.

The small wins.

The random laughs.

The ordinary afternoons that don’t look important now but might become the memories I’ll wish I could return to years from today.

Living in Nigeria doesn’t exactly make slowing down easy. Sometimes survival itself feels like a full-time job. The economy has a way of keeping your mind ten steps ahead, constantly calculating, constantly preparing for what’s next.

But even then, I don’t want to lose my ability to notice life while I’m living it.

To notice sunlight coming through the window.

To laugh a little longer.

To let conversations linger.

To make mistakes without immediately wishing I could erase them.

Maybe that’s the real magic About Time was trying to show us.

Not that we need more time.

Just that we need to be more present in the time we already have.

And maybe that’s enough.