Celeritas temporis

The speed of time

Almost two weeks into a four-week vacation, something unexpected finally happened: my brain shut up. The constant mental tab-hopping—deadlines, notifications, the vague sense of being “behind” at all times—has finally eased, and in the quiet that followed I found myself doing the dangerous thing you’re apparently not supposed to do on vacation: thinking. Not about work, or productivity, or what comes next on the calendar, but about time itself—how elastic it feels when you’re no longer measuring your life in meetings and obligations, and how strange it is that it took nearly fourteen days of deliberate absence just to remember what unhurried existence feels like.

The concept of time came to the forefront while I was stocking up on cooking supplies, casually evaluating jars of cumin and smoked paprika, when a practical thought surfaced: I couldn’t possibly use this much in my lifetime. It was meant as a sensible calculation—buy less, waste less, don’t overspend—but the implication landed harder than expected. What started as a mundane budgeting decision abruptly reframed itself as a quiet confrontation with finitude, the unsettling realization that even something as ordinary as spices can become a measure of how much time I assume I have left.

That realization slid naturally into a broader understanding of why time feels as though it accelerates as we age. Each passing day represents a smaller fraction of our total lived experience, a thinner slice of the whole, and so it registers with less weight than it once did. Childhood days stretched endlessly because they were enormous in proportion; now, days slip by almost unnoticed, absorbed into an already vast accumulation of memory. Time hasn’t actually sped up—our frame of reference has shifted—and the older we become, the more quickly each moment seems to vanish into the growing archive of everything that came before it.

Taken together, these moments reflect a quiet awakening: stepping away from constant motion allows time to be felt again, and in that stillness even ordinary decisions can expose how finite it is. As life accumulates, each day carries less proportional weight, making time seem to move faster—not because it does, but because we do—measuring the present against an ever-growing past.

Contemplating our own mortality and the nature of time isn’t meant to spiral into obsession; it’s meant to pause us long enough to reflect. Are we using our time intentionally, or letting it leak away on distractions that don’t actually matter? Are we living in alignment with who we want to be, or just staying busy enough to avoid asking the question? As this year winds down, it feels like the right moment to take stock of the past, acknowledge the present, and make deliberate adjustments for the future—small or large—that help us use the limited time we have with a little more purpose and a lot more honesty.