Einstein once put it simply: “When you sit with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a second. But when you sit on a hot stove for a second, it seems like an hour.” That’s relativity as we actually live it — not equations on a board, but the elasticity of experience.
We usually think of time as fixed — hours, days, years clicking by at the same relentless pace. But lived experience tells another story. Six days in Hawaii can feel like a month. A semester teaching abroad can stretch into what seems like a lifetime. Then suddenly, back home, whole years collapse into a blur.
What’s happening here isn’t magic, but perception. Time, like sight or touch, is a sense — and it can expand or contract depending on how we use it.
The Richness Exchange
I think of time as a kind of mental currency exchange. Rich days cost more, but they buy you something priceless: depth. Empty days are cheap — they slip past quickly but leave little in memory.
It’s why knowing you only had six months to live could, paradoxically, give you an eternity. Every moment would be amplified, dense with meaning. The clock doesn’t change — your perception of value does.
Icebergs and Mirrors
When I’ve traveled abroad, I’ve felt time moving like an iceberg. A single week away drifts by massive, slow, and full of hidden weight beneath the surface. Teaching in Russia, Iraq, or China — each day was swollen with novelty, fear, joy, and discovery. Back home, in the routines of ordinary life, whole months dissolve like mist.
We’ve all glimpsed this: a day away can feel like a week’s worth of living. That’s not sentimentality — it’s a clue that time isn’t linear in the way we experience it. It stretches to fit the density of our attention.
The Senses We Forgot
This ties back to the overlooked senses Grace mapped so well: balance, rhythm, proprioception, intuition, presence. These are the instruments through which time becomes felt, not just measured. When they’re awake, time grows thick. When they’re dulled, time thins out to nothing.
We’re not just beings who move through time. We’re beings who shape it by how we perceive.
Closing Thought
Maybe the lesson is this: eternity isn’t a matter of length but of density. The iceberg of six days can outweigh the drift of six years. And the senses we forgot — presence, rhythm, anticipation — may be the hidden levers by which we turn life from a calendar into something more.
Time isn’t only counted. Time is lived. And when we live fully, even a short span can feel like forever.