Time & Time Again

Last night, I watched ‘Lucy’ a film made in 2014 and directed by Luc Besson. The title role was played by Scarlett Johansson who is stunning herself but also played a sensational role. Scarlett is easy on the eye for sure, but her performance of the role in the movie and the transformations she goes through are equally thrilling .

Time is the one true law that governs us, the quiet sovereign before whom every human must bow, for in the end it is not numbers, rules, or equations that shape our lives, but the simple truth of how much time we are given and how swiftly it slips through our hands. We spend our lives counting what we have and fearing what we lack, yet as Lucy shows us, all our measurements and milestones are illusions beside the one force that truly governs us. In the film, as her mind expands beyond normal human limits, she sees what we rarely dare to face: that time is the first and final law. Not mathematics. Not power. Not the systems we build to feel in control. Time alone is the sovereign that shapes every life. It is the quiet Lord we cannot bargain with, the boundary that defines what it means to be human. Everything we cling to, identity, memory, achievement, exists only within the narrow corridor that time allows. And the moment we forget this, we begin to live as though we are infinite, as though the hours will always wait for us. Time is not a concept, it is a currency paid in breath, in presence, in the fragile weight of what we choose to notice. It is the invisible architecture of our lives, the thing we squander most easily, and feel most deeply when it slips. And perhaps that is the quiet truth Lucy leaves us with: that the measure of a life is not what we accumulate, but how fiercely we honour the moments we are given.

Over the past couple of months, my father has been unwell - I have spent weeks beside my father’s hospital bed, and more recently with him every night in his house; this has reminded me how differently time behaves when someone you love is unwell. Minutes stretch, hours tighten, and every delay feels like a small betrayal of hope. The staff caring for him have been mostly kind, diligent, and clearly stretched, and I hold genuine gratitude for their work. Yet when I was told that no MRI scan would take place over one weekend because the department is routinely short‑staffed at the weekend, something in me paused. Two days may seem administratively insignificant, but when an infection is moving through the body of a loved one, those days become a kind of existential weight. As a veteran, I come from a world where the calendar has no authority over urgency, where danger does not recognise weekends, and response cannot be deferred. I understand deeply that people need rest; no human being can operate without it. But moments like this make me wonder about the systems we build and the quiet assumptions they rest upon. If time is the one true law that governs us, then surely our structures should bend more readily to its demands. I am also well aware that I could be writing in a purely subjective manner, and this is not a criticism, but a reflection born from fear, gratitude, and the uncomfortable truth that time does not pause simply because we do. Thankfully, my dad is a fighter and will never give in, which is where I get it from.

Einstein showed us with his Theory of Relativity, that time is not fixed. It stretches and contracts depending on speed, gravity, and the observers frame of reference. There is no single, universal clock ticking the same for everyone. Pain or sorrow makes seconds feel like hours, joy makes hours vanish like minutes, intimacy suspends time altogether, fear slows it to a crawl, intoxication blurs it into something unmeasurable (one of the reasons it can be so dangerous). In physics, relativity is about motion and gravity, in human life, relativity is about intensity. Both say the same thing in different languages: time is not experienced equally by all observers. These moments when time behaves strangely, almost as if Einstein's relativity has slipped into the human heart, we do not live time equally; we feel it according to the weight of the moment we are in.

And when I look at all the contradictions above, I find myself circling the same question that sits quietly beneath Lucy: does time truly exist as an external force? Or is it something we create to steady ourselves against the chaos of being alive? Her journey suggests that the more we understand, the more the boundaries we cling to begin to dissolve. Yet here, in the very human world of hospital corridors and waiting rooms, time feels brutally real. It governs us, shapes us, humbles us. Perhaps that is the paradox we must learn to live with: that time is both the law that rules the universe and the illusion that bends under the weight of our experience, and in that tension between what is measured and what is felt, we discover what it means to be human.

So my final comment is this: if time is the law that governs us, bending and dissolving under the weight of our experience, then perhaps is it not pushing us forward at all, but urging us to become more conscious, more present, before it slips away. Try to enjoy each moment, time and time again.