On Time, and the Spaces Between
I don’t remember the exact moment I hit bottom on this journey.
I also can’t point to the moment my happiness began its upswing.
The same way I can’t recall when life was at its highest and quietly began its descent toward depression and burnout.
I don’t think time works that way.
We like to imagine it as a curve —a clean rise, a clear peak, an obvious fall. Or maybe a chart with neat blocks: good, bad, recovery. But our bodies don’t move like graphs. Our inner rhythms ebb and flow without announcing themselves. There is no bell that rings to say this is the moment everything changed.
Walking on the beach today, I found myself thinking about time —how we measure it.
Some things we measure in seconds.
Some in hours.
Some in years.
Some in decades.
Some in centuries.
And yet our own time here —our entire existence— barely registers on that scale at all.
I know this much: we are here for a brief moment. A blink, really. And that moment is meant to be lived, not just endured or optimized or explained away.
No one escapes challenge.
Not one of us.
The challenges differ —family, money, health, fear, loss, betrayal, bereavement — but they all live within time —infinite time.
And time doesn’t judge them. It just carries them forward.
What changes is how we look at them.
I can’t change what happened to me. I can’t redraw the past. But I can choose how I ride the current. I can accept that life moves in tides —sometimes pulling us under, sometimes lifting us gently toward shore.
Time doesn’t ask us to be steady.
It asks us to keep moving.
So I walk.
I breathe.
I ride the ebb.
I ride the flow.
And for now, that feels like enough.
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
— The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)