As a teenager, I decided I was going to master time.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
I started carrying around a stopwatch. In the middle of conversations, while sitting alone, while walking from one place to another, I would start the timer and try to stop it exactly at one minute.
At first, I was terrible. Then I got better. Then I got strangely good.
I didn’t know it then, but I was training my mind to sense duration. Not just measure time, but inhabit it. A minute in silence is different from a minute in conversation. A minute while anxious is not the same as a minute while absorbed. Time, I learned, is not neutral. It stretches, compresses, bends, and pulses through the body.
Decades later, I can still sense it.
I wake up at 3 a.m., rested, regardless of bedtime. I take a 25-minute nap and reach for my phone seconds before the alarm sounds. I travel to new places and, without consciously calculating, know when it is time to leave. I have never been late. Not because I am constantly watching the clock, but because some part of me seems to have become one.
For most of my life, this did not seem strange. It was simply the way I Am. My mind has always done things I don’t fully understand, and I’ve learned to trust some of them.
But the older I get, the more grateful I am for this particular gift.
Many people seem to struggle against time. They chase it, lose it, resent it, panic beneath it. For me, time has usually felt less like an enemy and more like a current. I don’t control it, but I can feel its movement. I can sense when the wave is about to crest.
There is humility in that. My conscious self is not the one doing most of the work. The deeper organism tracks, predicts, adjusts, and rings the bell before the bell rings.
Maybe teenage me did not master time.
Maybe he simply listened long enough for time to move inside him.
The clock was outside him, so he swallowed it.
Now the bell rings before the bell rings.