“Leaving it to time” is an expression that means letting things follow their natural course, trusting the flow of events, allowing room for maturation, and permitting situations to shape themselves. Sometimes it can also imply avoidance, passivity, or escaping responsibility. Here, however, we will focus on its positive meaning: doing everything one can, and then waiting to see what unfolds.
“Time heals all wounds.”
“He who is patient attains his desire.”
“Haste makes waste.”
“Everything comes to the one who knows how to wait.”
“There is a right time for everything.”
“Who knows what tomorrow may bring?”
“Water flows and finds its way.”
Time is the essence of transience itself. We experience a transient life in a transient manner. We call those immeasurably small moments “now.” The future and the past are merely different perspectives of the present moment. These “nows” flow like frames in a film; each frame erases the previous one, and within this flow we cling to moments in the past or future, falling into a great illusion: behaving as though everything were permanent. Yet nothing is permanent except impermanence itself.
“Light is the fastest thing, yet it still takes time to cross the universe.”
“When we look at the sky, we are not seeing space, but the past.”
We are under the illusion that we experience time. In truth, time is not an exception within the universe; it is the universe itself. The past is an illusion, the future a scenario, and the present a thin assumption separating the two. As Aristotle said, only the present exists. The future and the past are already illusions — perhaps even the present itself may not truly exist.
Even though we have not understood time, we claim to understand the events within it. Consider how drastically our perception of time has changed since childhood. Most of the fears we once carried have now turned into smiles. Many anxieties people suffer through appear ridiculous to others. The obsessions individuals have about their own lives are not even “wrong” within the totality of spacetime. Perhaps anxiety and depression — these problems rooted in the future and the past — are habits of those who fail to act as they should. For everyone who fulfills their responsibilities eventually realizes that life’s knots are solved not by force, but by leaving them to time. The art of non-interference begins with accepting that we are part of an autonomous system.
“Time is humanity’s harshest teacher.”
“Some knots are untied not by hand, but by time.”
“One does not learn to carry certain things by forgetting them, but by living through time.”
“Time does not pass; we pass.”
“The greatest changes are often made silently by time.”
“Every wound leaves a scar, but its pain changes.”
“It is not the forced doors, but the doors opened at the right time, that endure.”
“Some answers are understood not by thinking, but by living.”
“If something is not happening, either it is not its time, or it has no place in the story.”
“Sometimes time is needed not to gain, but to lose.”
Spacetime itself — though it appears fragmented and separate as a necessity of our existence — is fundamentally one. Within the already-charted journeys of two trillion galaxies, humanity’s anxieties about time resemble more a deserved affliction than a genuine problem. Just like the contradiction hidden within this very expression, it is a response we give to ourselves.
Do we truly have any choice other than leaving things to time?
