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 hold onto 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.
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.

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 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

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!