Time like a cat

Snaps from my gallery - 25.10.2025

Recently, I was waiting in a waiting area to meet someone I’d been longing to meet for some time. Since the wait (in the actual moment) was long, out of habit, I focused on my phone and ended up reading a few blog posts by my former boss, Malinda Seneviratne. He has his own way of seeing the world, and often it makes you see things from a different perspective. Sometimes these aren’t even big matters, just everyday small ones, but they somehow make a big impact.

One article I read was about time. It was titled The length and breath of time. 

It got me thinking about the exact moment I was in – what a long time I had waited for it. And then the moment finally happened, and the long-anticipated meeting was over in under 10 minutes (or so). The way I remember it, it was just a flash. But I had spent such a long time creating that moment in my mind – Imagining how the conversation would go, what the outcome would be. There were so many versions of it in my head, and I surely spent a very long time living in that ‘imaginary’ moment.

But the real moment was nothing like what I had imagined, not slow, not one where I could clearly express myself. It wasn’t really a conversation, and I didn’t get to say what I wanted.

Such is time. In our minds, the way time runs doesn’t really match the speed the hands of a clock move. Time in our heads runs on very different rules and that’s not always a good thing. I kept thinking about what Malinda wrote the entire evening after the meeting – about how the measurements of time work, and how none of it applies to the ‘time’ that runs in our minds.

The person I met also mentioned something about time. “We’ve come into this world for such a short time, and then we go back. It’s not necessary to worry about unnecessary business during that short time.”

But it IS our business! Worrying about all the unnecessary business inside our minds for long stretches of time. Which, compared to the time we actually live, isn’t really that significant.

The next day, I started reading Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls. I’m still reading it, and the first few chapters again got me thinking about time. It’s mysterious somehow, how my stars align – because when I start thinking about something, everything happening around me seems to remind me of that same thing.

 

“I work from around five in the evening until around ten at night.”

“Around?”

“All the time there is approximate. There’s a tall clock tower in the square, but the clock doesn’t have any hands.”

 

I pictured a clock tower without hands. The character in the book did too.

 

Maybe the clock tower in our minds also doesn’t have its hands.

And then again, Murakami writes:

 “Even without a clock, time soundlessly passed. Like a slender cat stealthily making its way along the top of a wall.”

 

Such are cats. They move so silently that you might not even notice them until they’re gone. But I guess time only passes like a cat when it’s something we want to hold on to and make go slowly. For the unwanted events, time moves heavily – dragging its feet.