Time is a Clue Factory

I believe that our lived experience is shaped less by what happens to us and more by how we relate to time itself. Everything we endure or enjoy—work, rest, illness, healing, love, loss—only takes meaning within time. What matters is not merely the events that occur, but how we inhabit the moments while they are happening and how we place them within our personal narrative afterward. Time feels like a kind of clue factory, quietly revealing meaning not through events themselves, but through how we inhabit time through events. Breathing, sleeping, suffering — even unconsciousness — are all variations of this relationship. Living itself is fundamentally a temporal experience.

Much of modern culture distracts us from this truth, particularly material frameworks that teach us to measure time by productivity. Wealth pretends to grant “better time,” as though accumulation were evidence of meaning. Yet wealth is relative. There are people who live with little who nonetheless describe lives that are full, meaningful, even long — difficult as they may be. Purpose is not born from ownership but from how we dwell within time.

I think material wealth often distorts this relationship to time. It teaches us that productivity equals worth and that a “good life” is measured by output and accumulation rather than depth of experience. Yet many people with far fewer resources report living meaningful or “full” lives precisely because their sense of value comes from presence and connection, not possessions or performance.

I see the body as another teacher of our relationship to time, especially through sleep and pain. Sleep is not meaningful because of how many hours we achieve —it matters because of how restorative it feels in lived experience. Pain reveals even more clearly how time shapes perception. When we become fixated on escaping pain, time stretches endlessly and suffering intensifies. But when pain is accepted as unavoidable in a moment, the experience changes. The pain does not disappear, yet it becomes survivable. I experienced this directly during an episode of extreme physical pain where time seemed suspended, and surrender—not resistance—shifted the experience from psychological agony into something grounding and endurable.

I believe this same dynamic operates in emotional pain and trauma. Because the brain is plastic, our relationship to memory and meaning is not fixed. We cannot change what happened, but we can change how those moments live in time. Healing does not require denying trauma—it requires refusing to let trauma become the definition of identity. It is the difference between recognizing suffering as a chapter and allowing it to become the entire story of who we are.

This is why I’m wary of rigid “victim identity.” I don’t deny harm or suffering. I believe people absolutely deserve validation and compassion. But when identity is built primarily around being a victim, the self becomes anchored to a single moment in time. The narrative freezes growth and traps people psychologically in the past rather than empowering movement forward. To me, this framing is ultimately cruel—not because it names pain, but because it risks imprisoning people inside it.

I believe freedom does not come from controlling circumstances; it comes from shaping our relationship to experience. Suffering becomes survivable when it is accepted rather than resisted, when it is placed where it belongs in time—as something that happened, not something that defines who we are forever—and when individuals reclaim authorship of meaning rather than inheriting a fixed narrative of injury.

In short, I believe healing and freedom arise when we stop allowing painful moments to define our identity and instead choose how we relate to time itself.