Time is a current, silent and unrelenting, flowing beneath all things, sweeping them forward whether they will or no. It does not ask for consent. It does not waver or turn back. It wears down the mountains, hollows the rivers, reshapes the contours of the land, not with violence, not with fury, but with something worse—patience. Its hands are invisible, but its work is everywhere, pressing against stone, against skin, against steel, against memory itself.
You move through its tides without seeing them, your days spent in the narrow channels of schedules and obligations, the rigid structures that men build to convince themselves they are not adrift. You step from glass tower to glass tower, your shoes tapping against pavement laid over the hushed whispers of the buried earth. You navigate your days like a ship threading through a fog-choked river, convinced that the markers of progress—the contracts, the transactions, the accumulation of things—are proof of direction, proof of purpose. And yet, beneath it all, the world shifts. It always shifts.
Somewhere beyond the city, the forest is reclaiming what was stolen from it. The roots push upward, breaking through forgotten roads, splitting concrete into useless rubble. A red-winged blackbird cuts through the sky in a sharp arc, its wings a fleeting flash of color against the indifferent expanse of clouds. A dog circles three times before curling into itself, the habit of a thousand generations encoded in its blood. These things happen without witness, without audience, without the need for validation. They simply are.
And yet you, who pride yourself on your mastery of time, do not see them. You do not notice the light shifting across the walls of your office, the way the day itself breathes, expands, contracts, ends. You do not hear the wind when it moves through the alleys, whispering against the glass, as if it might slip through the cracks and remind you of something you have long forgotten. You do not feel the weight of history pressing through the soles of your shoes, the quiet insistence of the world continuing its work beneath you.
You believe you are building something permanent. You believe that the machines will hold, that the towers will stand, that the numbers you chase will mean something when all is said and done. But time has swallowed greater things than this. It has reduced empires to dust, turned ambition to ruin, rewritten the land over and over again, unbothered by the names carved into its surface. The ocean will rise. The forests will return. The stone itself will break apart and scatter. And you—where will you be when the tide comes in?
It is not too late. Not yet. There is still time to see, to bear witness, to understand. Step outside. Put your hand against the bark of a tree, something older than the world you know, something that will outlast you in ways you cannot comprehend. Stand beneath the sky without shelter, let the wind wrap around you, feel the pull of something deeper than this race you have been running. Time does not wait, but it does not hide either. It is there, in the mist rising from the earth at dawn, in the slow bend of a branch heavy with age, in the flickering flight of a bird that has never known the weight of a roof over its head.
The world does not belong to you. It never has. But if you are quiet—if you let the current take you, if you stop resisting, stop clawing against the inevitable—you might, for a moment, feel it all. The rhythm of something ancient. The vast machinery of the earth turning, forever unhurried, forever unstoppable. The slow, magnificent unraveling of everything you thought would last.
4o
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