Making Peace with Time Before It Slips Away
Our uneasy relationship with time—and 18 inspiring quotes to help us slow it down
Photo: Dean Drobot/Shutterstock
Time is a game played beautifully by children.
— Heraclitus
As we age, many of us forget how to play that game. The carefreeness of it all.
We curse time: how it flies, how there’s never enough of it, how it disappears without warning. One minute, it’s early June, the next—bam—Fourth of July is in the rearview mirror. Another birthday. In and out, like a ghost.
It feels… unfair!
I’ll admit: I don’t have the healthiest relationship with time. Some might say I’m a little fixated—on how the minutes, hours, days (hell, years) hurtle past at warp speed. I often feel like a bystander to my own life, frustrated as more time vanishes before I’ve had a chance use it more wisely. I rush around, trying to get more done, hoping to trick time into thinking I don’t notice it’s speeding up.
Time feels… unhinged. There’s no peace in that.
The more I try to chase it—or wrangle it—the more it slips through my fingers.
Time. It wasn’t always like this. The obsession crept in with the onset of middle-age markers: My only son leaving home to join the Navy (empty nester syndrome is real!); turning sixty; my parents becoming elderly while I wasn’t paying attention.
Time collapsed in on itself a few months ago as I held my dad, comforting him through his final moments… until he drew his last breath. He was ninety-one. (Where did the time go?)
In the weeks that followed, I felt suspended—stuck in a moment I didn’t want to leave. Hoping time might pause with me, just for a while. But it didn’t.
Eventually (just last week, in fact), I realized it was time to shift my perspective. I realized what I’ve really been chasing isn’t control over time, but peace with it.
(What took me so long?)
Sure, time’s dropping from holes in our pockets like sad potatoes. No, we can’t hold onto all of it. But we can stop flailing around and start thinking about time less like a ticking bomb and more like a semi-helpful frenemy who occasionally shows up with snacks.
We need to starting seeing time as a gift.
To stop sprinting through life like time is out to get us. To start working with the time we have (instead of juggling it like flaming swords). To figure out how to move with it, not against it. To stop hurrying. To stop letting time call all the shots. To reconnect with our carefree, younger selves. To see every day that we wake up breathing as a gift of time.
Because, dammit, life’s too short for this bullshit.
© Lynn J. Broderick 2025 | All rights reserved
If you, too, are trying to make peace with time, these 18 quotes might help.
Don’t worry—it won’t take much of your time to read them.
Side Note: Writing this piece and finding all these quotes stole at least sixty-seven minutes of my life. Consider them my gift to you.
Time can’t be slowed, but our grip on it can. When that urgency shows up, feel one breath and the weight of your feet, name it “resisting,” and let it pass. We don’t control time…we rest in now.
Time is an illusion.
— Albert Einstein
Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.
— Dr. Seuss
It’s being here now that’s important. There’s no past and there’s no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.
— George Harrison
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
— George Bernard Shaw
Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
— Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette Married
The trouble is, you think you have time.
— Jack Kornfield (often misattributed to Buddha)
Time is the longest distance between two places.
— Tennessee Williams
For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.
— Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button screenplay
Free time is the most expensive time you have, because nobody pays for it but you. But that also makes it the most valuable time you have, as you alone stand to reap the profits from spending it wisely.
— Jarod Kintz, I Should Have Renamed This
Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can’t buy more hours. Scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.
— Denis Waitley
Time is the wisest counselor of all
– Pericles
For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.
– C.S. Lewis
The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.
— Abraham Lincoln
The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.
— Michael Altshuler
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
— Groucho Marx
You can’t turn back the clock. But you can wind it up again.
— Bonnie Prudden
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
—Henry David Thoreau
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.
— Seneca
Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once... and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
— Susan Sontag
Do you have any time hangups? Quotes to help us shake off our time obsession? Share them here!
More about me
I live in the Chicago suburbs with my husband, chasing my lifelong dream of writing a novel. When I’m not sharing memoir-ish stories and unfiltered thoughts, I’m blending smoothies, walking backwards, or staring at my phone waiting for a text from my Navy son. Read more about why I write here.
Want to help my work get noticed in Substack’s noisy world?
❤️ Press the heart: Also lets me know you read this.
💬 Leave a comment: My favorite part of Substack: hearing your thoughts, stories, and reactions.
♻️ Restack: Share with the world—this makes me extra grateful.
📩 Subscribe: Get new posts by email or right in the Substack app.
Every bit of support means a lot.
~ Lynn
So… time. Humanity’s most passive-aggressive invention. We built clocks to measure it, calendars to chase it, and apps to pretend we’re managing it. Yet somehow, we’re always shocked when another year sneaks up and steals our hairline.
Remember when time felt endless? Long afternoons where five minutes could hold a lifetime of joy? Then adulthood showed up, and five years vanish faster than your phone battery during a crisis. Possibly the Productivity Police show up and say "What is this....leisure?"
We keep trying to control time, as if the right planner or vitamin regimen could stop entropy. But time isn’t a pet you can train. It’s a trickster. It waits, grinning, while we sprint through to-do lists, mistaking movement for meaning.
Maybe we’ve got it backwards. Maybe time was never the enemy. Maybe it’s the mirror showing us how afraid we are to be still.
We talk about “losing time,” but time doesn’t disappear. It’s us who vanish from it. Lost in nostalgia. Obsessed with next week. Refusing to sit in the unbearable beauty of now.
The goal isn’t to beat the clock. It’s to stop fighting it. To dance badly with it. To waste an afternoon doing nothing but feeling alive.
Because time doesn’t need your obedience. It needs your attention.
Every second you notice—the dog’s sigh, the sound of rain, the pulse in your wrist—that’s eternity catching your gaze.
Life isn’t about managing time. It’s about remembering it’s not the enemy, it’s the invitation. The quiet, relentless reminder that everything you love is temporary. Which is exactly what makes it sacred.
This is the engine I feel separate from me very much. It has no reigns sometimes, & detaching or jettisoning from the commander’s deck is sometimes a helpful way to reclaim time that is aligned to more current affairs, relevant to you in the immediate now