time as a spiritual teacher; the luxury of moving slowly
Time is not real. It is the moving image of eternity.PlatoWe live in a culture that worships acceleration. The faster you respond, the quicker you rise, the more efficiently you produce, the more valuable you are. This illusion has been dressed up as ambition, productivity, even progress. But beneath it is fear: the fear of being left behind, of being forgotten, of losing control.
I didn’t fully see this until my own rhythm began to collapse.
In my 20s, I thought momentum was everything. I filled my days with back-to-back projects, endless to-do lists, and the pressure to keep proving myself. There was no room for silence, no patience for stillness. If I wasn’t producing, I thought I was losing.
But eventually, I hit the wall. My body resisted the grind, my spirit resisted the noise, and life itself began to strip me of the illusion that I could keep running endlessly. That’s when I realized: time itself is a spiritual teacher.
Slowness reveals what speed conceals.
When I gave myself permission to pause, I discovered something I had never been taught: the pause itself is a portal.
If you pause long enough, you step into what mystics call the void. The void is not emptiness in the way society defines it. It is the womb of all creation. It is the place where identities, roles, and timelines fall away, and you are confronted with yourself stripped of performance.
Here is the brutal truth: most people never enter the void because they are terrified of it. Silence feels like death. Stopping feels like failure. So they run back to noise, another project, another distraction, another addiction, or anything to avoid being with themselves. That is why their lives repeat in loops: different faces, same lesson.
The void will break you, and that is the point.
It breaks the illusion that busyness is progress.
It breaks the need to prove your worth through output.
It breaks the false security of control.
And on the other side of that breaking is clarity. Slowness, then, is not just about patience. It is about having the courage to enter the void without rushing to fill it.
This is the lesson time teaches when you finally stop running:
Patience — learning that what belongs to you cannot be rushed.
Clarity — seeing without distortion because urgency no longer clouds the vision.
Elegance — the quiet grace that comes when you stop chasing and start allowing.
Initiation — realizing that every pause, every delay, every silence is a doorway into the void where transformation begins.
The achievements I once rushed toward now feel meaningless compared to the richness of slowness. What once looked like “falling behind” has revealed itself as alignment. So much of what the world calls power is simply noise. True power is quiet. True wealth is not found in accumulation, but in the freedom to move at your own pace, to let time teach you without force.
And so I’ve come to see that time is not an enemy to race against, it is a teacher to surrender to.
The luxury of moving slowly is not idleness; it is a deliberate pace. It is sovereignty. It is the void disguised as delay. It is the brutal reminder that something in you must die before something greater can be born. Nothing real can be rushed, and nothing eternal can ever be late.
