A Journey Through Time

The other day, I picked up my daughter from preschool. After a brief chat about her day, she asked me how long it would take to get where we were going. “About 45 minutes,” I said. She paused for a moment, looked up at me, and asked: “Is that big or small? ”I smiled. “Big,” I said.

Such a simple question kept me thinking for hours. Is time really big or small? Or does it simply depend on how we feel it? For my daughter, 45 minutes was perhaps an eternity. For me, it was just a familiar stretch of time.

In that moment, I realized: time is much more than a measurable quantity. It's a perspective. A feeling. Maybe even a delicate web our minds weave to make sense of the world.

That innocent question took me back to my own childhood. I can’t remember when I first became aware of time. Maybe it was when my mother said, “You’ll be late,” or when the school bell rang for the first time. Or perhaps it was when I waited too long for something I really wanted. But the first time I tried to understand time—that’s when I truly met it. Not just the hours and minutes, but the time ticking within me.

I found myself facing one of the oldest questions in philosophy: What is time? Augustine once said, “What is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. But if I try to explain it, I don’t know.” So familiar, so true. Time stands at the very center of our lives and yet constantly slips through our fingers. We can’t see it or touch it, but we feel it. It’s both real and an illusion.

Sometimes I feel like a prisoner of time. Like everyone else, I have to keep up with work, responsibilities, goals.But I often ask myself: Who am I really trying to keep up with?

Aristotle defined time as "the number of motion." In other words, we recognize time by observing change.So maybe time isn’t just a tool for measurement, it’s a witness to transformation. And we are that transformation itself.

For a long time, physics treated time as constant. Newton imagined it as a river flowing at the same speed everywhere in the universe.Then came Einstein, who changed everything. With his theory of relativity, time became bendable, flexible, a dimension that warps with gravity and motion.

Time was no longer universal. It became personal. The faster we go, the slower it moves. The more mass around us, the more it curves.

But when we enter the world of quantum mechanics, everything shifts to an entirely different plane.

At the quantum level, time might not even exist in the classical sense. In quantum physics, time often behaves like a parameter, just a tool for calculation.

Some physicists, like Carlo Rovelli, propose that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of the universe. Quantum field theories and loop quantum gravity models suggest that time could be an illusion.

In the deepest structures of reality, perhaps there is no “before” and “after”, only relations and probabilities.

These thoughts both excite and confuse me, maybe what we call time exists only in our perception. Maybe time exists because we do. And perhaps, as the only creatures who remember, we construct time from the traces of the past we carry with us.

Sometimes, I just want to stop time. To simply be, free from the weight of the past and the anxiety of the future.

Bergson called this duration, a flowing, inner time not bound by clocks or calendars. He believed true time is felt, not measured. Maybe the first step to understanding time is learning to feel it within ourselves.

And perhaps, as the only beings with memories, we don’t build time from moments gone by, but from what we feel in those moments.

The past, memories, regrets, lessons...The future, plans, dreams, fears...But the present? That often escapes us. The “now” that razor-thin line, passes before we even realize it was there.

Yet true time lives only there in the present.The past is a thought. The future is just a possibility.

I’m no longer trying to conquer time. I’m learning to understand it. To walk beside it. To make peace with it.

Philosophy, science, and my heart seem to agree:Time is not an enemy. It’s simply there. Flowing silently. And sometimes, all we need is to pause, breathe with it...and maybe, just maybe, that's where real living begins.