Time—there never seems to be enough, yet it’s the only thing we truly have in abundance. And as another year prepares to turn over, we’re reminded once again of how slippery time can be. It can even seem as though it has a mind of its own. Two minutes at a stoplight can stretch into an eternity, yet those same two minutes vanish when they’re the last moments spent with someone you love. Two people can attend the same event and walk away with opposite impressions—one certain it dragged on forever, the other wondering how it passed so quickly. The child says, “When will Christmas get here? It’s taking forever!” while the parent laments, “Is it that time again? I just finished paying all the bills from the last one!”

Nature has always offered us a gentle way to mark the passage of time—the slow arc of the sun, the steady phases of the moon, the predictable sweep of the stars across the night sky. For most of human history, that was enough. Time moved with the world, not against it. But this lazy, laid-back rhythm doesn’t stand a chance against the constant, whirlwind lives we’ve built for ourselves.

Once trains began racing across continents in the 19th century, our old system of local solar time—where every town set its clocks by the sun—became chaos. By the early 1880s, North America had more than a hundred different local times, each tied to its own church steeple or jeweler’s window. A traveler’s pocket watch was useless; station clocks contradicted one another; schedules were a tangle no one could reliably follow. So, in 1883, the railroads created the first standardized time zones in the United States and Canada, and a year later the world adopted the Prime Meridian at Greenwich. What began as a practical fix for trains became the scaffolding for modern life.

And then, as time goes by, something in us shifts. Our calendars stay full, but our bodies begin to slow. The whirlwind pace we once kept without thinking becomes harder to maintain. And suddenly that slow, unhurried passage of time—the one nature offered us all along—feels like something we long to return to. As the horizon of our lives comes into clearer view, we find ourselves wishing time would ease its stride, just enough for us to do what we should have been doing from the beginning: enjoying the ride, pausing for the sweetness, and finally stopping to smell the roses.

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