I didn’t see it clearly until a rare free afternoon arrived.
No meetings. No deadlines. Just time.
But instead of breathing, I counted the hours in emails unanswered.
That’s when I realized — the harvest had outgrown the root.
In finance, the “Time Value of Money” is a simple calculation:
a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow because of what it can earn in the meantime.
It’s a principle designed for markets, not for people.
But somewhere along the way, it slipped its boundaries.
It began to measure more than money.
It began to measure us.
I could feel it in my own life — in the way I weighed whether a lunch with a friend was “worth” the lost working hours, or how I justified checking my phone at my child’s game because “just two minutes” might save me twenty later.
I thought I was being efficient.
Really, I was letting the market’s clock run my days.
The narrowing of value
Value once stood on its own.
It could mean beauty, meaning, or significance — even if no one was buying, selling, or counting it.
I didn’t notice it at first — but the way I measured my days had already changed.
But when the time value of money escaped its spreadsheets, “value” began to shrink.
The useful became the valuable.
The slow became the wasteful.
The irreplaceable became the impractical.
And so time itself shifted — no longer soil to tend, but currency to trade: minutes for output, presence for productivity, whole seasons of life for a salary or a score.
I’ve felt it when cutting a vacation short for a “can’t-miss” meeting, or letting work calls bleed into dinner.
In those moments, I wasn’t just trading hours — I was trading roots for a faster harvest.
We stopped asking what something is worth in meaning, and started asking what it’s worth in return.
The collapse of time
In this logic, time that doesn’t produce is time that doesn’t matter.
Long-term stewardship gives way to short-term gain.
We build for the quarter, not the century.
We prize the fast harvest over the slow root.
And so the days pass — poured out like water through open fingers, scattered like pages from an unread book, trampled like seedlings never given the sun.
We forget they are unrepeatable.
I’ve rushed through milestones just to “get to the next thing,” only to realize later that the moment I sped past was the one I’d remember most.
The awakening
Not all cultures have told time this way.
In the West, time has often been seen as linear — a race from beginning to end, where progress is marked in milestones and measured in accumulation.
In much of the East, time is understood more cyclically — a turning of seasons, a return to what matters, a patience that doesn’t panic when the harvest is still far off.
But patience has its shadows, too.
I’ve lived in places where “later” meant “never,” where important change was delayed into oblivion.
The East can lose itself in waiting just as the West can burn itself out in haste.
Other traditions offer counterweights:
- Sabbaticals in Jewish and Christian practice, where land and labor rest every seventh year.
- Indigenous seasonal calendars that follow the cues of weather, migration, and growth rather than the fixed grid of a clock.
- Religious rest days across cultures — pauses woven into the week to honor presence over productivity.
What would it look like if we lived by those rhythms now?
- Maybe mornings would start with slow walks instead of scrolling headlines.
- Maybe workplaces would close for a day of true rest, and children would learn the names of local birds before the names of global brands.
- Maybe our calendars would show moon phases and planting seasons alongside our deadlines.
Awakening begins when we stop treating time as a shrinking asset and start seeing it as a shared field — one where the roots matter as much as the harvest.
The reckoning
The reckoning comes for all of us.
It’s the Schindler’s List moment — standing with what’s left in our hands and realizing each watch, each ring, each hour could have freed one more life, changed one more outcome, lifted one more weight from another’s shoulders.
It’s Anthony Bourdain, years into global success, admitting with quiet regret that he had missed too many moments of his daughter’s early life — realizing time is the one resource you cannot earn back.
It’s Mahatma Gandhi, distilling a lifetime of political and spiritual insight into a warning against “Commerce without morality” and “Wealth without work” — a recognition that value stripped from virtue becomes its own form of poverty.
It’s the Titanic’s half-empty lifeboats, drifting away while hundreds were left behind — a haunting image of capacity unused, of what might have been spared if fear and urgency had given way to courage and care.
And so the clock will keep moving either way.
And so the choice will always be ours: to chase the harvest, or to tend the root.
A return to the root
Lately, I’ve been trying to measure my life by different clocks — not the kind that tick in seconds, but the ones that breathe in seasons.
It’s in the sound of my child’s laugh during an unhurried breakfast.
It’s in the smell of rain-soaked soil after I’ve taken the long way home.
It’s in the way a friend’s story unfolds when neither of us is watching the time.
These moments don’t compound like investments, but they grow roots — and in their quiet way, they keep you standing long after the harvest is gone.