I once took part in a seminar where a few dozen of us were bussed to a busy city, then left to wander around on our own. We had no instructions except to meet back at the bus at a certain time that afternoon.

Before leaving, we were asked to list our fears about the adventure. I had only one: Since we’d been encouraged not to wear watches or carry cell phones, I was worried I’d have no way of knowing what time it was.

Hahahaha!

That was the day I learned how thoroughly timekeeping permeates our society. Time was displayed everywhere: clocks on buildings, parking meters, TV screens, security cameras, and, of course, on virtually every human wrist and phone.

Time is the grid on which the dramas of modern life play out. The time we emerge from the womb is noted on our birth certificates. If we die in a hospital, someone announces, “Time of death…”

I think all this timekeeping makes us feel secure. But it can also make us feel imprisoned.

For most of my life, I experienced time as a mechanical monster, marching relentlessly forward, ultimately consuming everything I loved and everything I was.

I was just a ray of sunshine.

But what if there are other ways to see time? As activist and mediator adrienne maree brown writes, “Cultures with long memories, still connected to their oldest ways, know that time is nonlinear, circular, mysterious.”

Contemplating time this way can set you free, because thinking about time differently can lead to experiencing it differently. In fact, playing with time has become one of my favorite things. 

Here are three new ideas about time that have been especially liberating for me. I hope they will be for you, too.

Thought the First: Time is not constant. It can bend, shrink, and stretch

I remember practically panting with relief when I first read Einstein’s take on time. He showed that time is not constant: A person traveling at high speed experiences time more slowly than someone who isn’t moving. At the speed of light, no time passes at all.

This felt profoundly right to me, though not especially useful in daily life, since my ability to travel at the speed of light, despite hours of effort, remains disappointing.

Then I read the memoir of violin prodigy Min-Jin Kym. Kym writes about learning to manipulate her experience of time. When she couldn’t move her fingers fast enough to play certain passages, she would stretch time by slowing her mind. “f you can see past time, let time elongate,” Kym says, “then you can play it all.”

And then there’s adrienne maree brown, whose book Holding Change recounts intense meetings where people hashed out their differences. She writes:

I have been in so many rooms where we bent time, expanding it for a big emotion to move through, reversing it to undo a harm, finding ourselves satisfied well before our planned ending time. I always consider that maybe we didn’t bend it, but the universe, a great spirit, approved of our work and opened it for us.

Einstein, Kym, and brown all approached time not simply as a relentless, unalterable force, but as something stranger and more creative. And that shift had practical consequences.

Rethinking time can move us into this kind of creativity. It’s deep art, whether we’re scientists decoding the universe, musicians playing impossible passages, or activists connecting minds and hearts.

TRY THIS

The next time you see something beautiful, give it all your attention for the space of one long, slow breath.

Inhale. Exhale. Nothing in your mind but that beauty.

Imagine your attention as a camera clicking on the moment.

There.

You’ve just created a moment you may carry for decades, one your mind can return to and experience again. You can bend time back to that instant like Marcel Proust eating a madeleine.

Thought the Second: Time can disappear entirely—and it wants to

If you doubt that slowing your mind changes your experience of time, try meditating for a solid hour. If you’re not used to it, the first five minutes can feel like a month of Sundays.

Time becomes sluggish. Endless.

But if we keep sitting and sitting and sitting, sometimes the mind decides there’s no point in continuing to struggle. Then something amazing happens.

Time disappears.

It really, truly does.

When the mind releases its death grip on schedules, past experiences, and whatever may happen next, it can reveal something simultaneously ordinary and earthshaking:

There is no such thing as time. There is only now. Ever.

When this reality first began flickering into my own awareness, meditation stopped feeling like grimly virtuous mental hygiene and became a magical viewfinder through which literally anything could happen. The universe became a vast three-dimensional image, forever disappearing and coming into being:

Now, now, now, now, now.

A still mind lives on the line where time and eternity intersect. William Blake understood this. He left us these instructions:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

“Eternity” doesn’t mean “that which lasts forever.” It means “that which is beyond time.” When we drop completely into now, time disappears and offers us a glimpse of the infinite.

I’ve been advised not to write about this because it isn’t relatable to the average person. “First of all, you sound weird,” I’ve been told. “Also, you don’t want to set people up for failure. Not everyone can have this experience.”

But I believe we can.

In fact, I think we’re meant to.

TRY THIS

Go for a long walk. If you can’t walk, go for a long drive. If you can’t walk or drive—as I couldn’t for much of my life because of chronic pain—congratulations! You’ve been given a golden opportunity to be still.

Once you’re walking, driving, or lying down, soften the focus of your eyes until everything in your field of vision has equal importance. Then include everything you hear, feel, taste, and smell. The key is to give everything in your perceptual field equal attention.

At the moment you manage this, you won’t notice that you’ve stopped tracking time. You’ll see that later. What you’ll notice now is an extraordinary stillness, the line where time and eternity intersect. And in that no-time, your soul will feel at home.

Thought the Third: We can transform time, going forward or backward

In his poem “To an English Friend in Africa,” the Nigerian poet Ben Okri wrote:

Time is now a gift for you
A gift of freedom
To think and remember and understand
The ever perplexing past
And to re-create yourself anew
In order to transform time.

When I first heard this, I thought it was pretty verbiage. Now I think it’s deeply—and perhaps literally—true.

From the present moment, we can transform the line of time stretching backward into our past and forward into our future.

I’ve watched hundreds of people do this by changing what their memories meant to them. Right there in front of me, the disaster that ruined a life becomes a passageway to wisdom. The achievement that defined someone becomes a shiny but unimportant plaything. The self they despised becomes a hero they can love and celebrate.

When we change our view of what happened to us, we change ourselves in the present—and therefore, the whole sequence of events that resulted in one outcome can be seen as leading to another.

In a more woo-woo vein, I’ve also seen people—most of the people I’ve coached, actually—intuit things that later happened to them. Sometimes they deliberately sought these glimpses; other times they simply arrived. I’ve had such glimpses myself. 

I don’t know how to explain this. My pet theory is that consciousness, like light, somehow exists where all time is present—that at the level of pure consciousness, linear time doesn’t exist.

So if you’ve ever had a flash of future knowledge, don’t automatically dismiss it. Explore it. Give it a little room.

TRY THIS

Remember a disappointment you experienced when you were younger. Choose something that no longer hurts, something that has healed completely.

Imagine going back to the younger you who has just experienced it. Sit beside that person. Offer comfort.

Say, “I’m from your future, and I know for sure you’ll get past this. It will all be okay.”

Then explain how things get better.

Now find something in your present life that worries you. Imagine a figure walking into the room, sitting down beside you. It is your future self, from a time beyond death:

“I’m from your future,” says your future self gently, “and I know for sure you’ll get past this. It will all be okay.”

Let it explain how. Don’t strain to invent an answer. Just listen.

Playing with Time

After decades of questioning our usual concept of time, I find myself living in a much friendlier universe. Where I used to see time as a homicidal robot, it now feels more like a weird cosmic puppy that keeps dropping eternity at my feet and asking me to throw it.

When I “don’t have time” to accomplish something, allowing myself to imagine time as stretchable often seems to open up hours in peculiar ways: cancellations, happy calendar errors, someone unexpectedly taking a task off my hands.

When I fall completely into the present, I’m stunned by the sense of absolute home I experience in the strange intersection where time meets eternity.

And when I imagine time as changeable in both directions, old regrets and tragedies can morph into priceless gifts, while possibilities from the future seem to ripple gently backward into the present to reassure me.

All those years ago, when I set off into an unfamiliar city without a watch, I thought time was something I had to track, measure, and obey. Now I prefer to play with it. And strangely enough, I always find it playing along with me.