Tiffany Zhu

It’s not the time itself that steals from us, but the desire to measure it and force every moment to be productive or thoughtful. Sure, not having her around is a reminder that time is finite, but I’m not so fixated on it anymore.

The concept of time entered my life not as a fact, but as a threat. I was always told that time slips away and that I must capture it, chase it and make the most of it. What if time was never as short-lived as I was led to believe? What if the moments I experience never really left, lingering in ways I could never track?

With a sister seven years older than me, I always felt like I had no time with her before she left for college, as if the moments we shared were borrowed from some invisible clock I couldn’t see. 

I remember one evening, when she was home from college and I was 12, we decided to take a walk around our neighborhood under the streetlights, bundled in our warm jackets. I tried to plan every detail of our conversation, thinking of questions to ask and stories to share, worried that I might waste a single second with her. She, on the other hand, kept pointing out little things around us, and at one point, she burst out laughing at how my jacket made me look like a large marshmallow. I tried to steer the conversation back to something “important,” but soon after I was laughing too. 

On the occasions that she came home from college, I spent so much time trying to make each visit so perfect that I forgot to enjoy it. Our laughter, conversations and even walks around the neighborhood passed by in a blur, clouded by my obsession with arranging memories instead of sharing them. 

Now, my sister is occupied with work in New York, and I only see her for a few days over the holidays. A few years ago, that would have sent me into panic, worrying over how to maximize every moment I spent with her. However, watching her thrive as an adult, I realized that if I maintained that consuming mindset of researching every detail about potential activities or pre-planning every hangout in hopes of enhancing our experience, I would have never cherished her presence. 

When I stopped trying to purposefully turn our interactions into profound memories, time seemed to slow down. In those moments, time felt like it was unfolding on its own. We shouldn’t treat time as something to be optimized just so we can say we “did it all,” or ignore it completely under the assumption that we have plenty of it.

I’ve grown to believe that we should prioritize passion over urgency. The moments with loved ones that have stayed with me were never the ones I tried to perfect, but ones where I forgot that time was passing. They were already complete in their simplicity: laughter over nothing, silly fist bumps and the warmth of their presence. 

Time is not fleeting; it is our fear of time that steals the richness from our lives, and I choose not to be afraid.