Time is Passing, But Are You?

My eighth-grade Latin teacher was a burly, brown-haired man with a penchant for student misery. He told us as much on the first day of school, as he gleefully passed out a thick syllabus filled with small rules and minor oddities designed to strike fear into the hearts of scrawny middle-school students. Kids with oversized backpacks and even larger attitudes.

Amid the slew of random, annoying classroom traditions, such as prohibited bathroom breaks, vocabulary pop quizzes, and censures for sprawling backpack straps, my teacher had one rule that superseded all others: “No looking at the clock.”

While the rule was particularly cruel for kids suffering the ennui of a Latin class, my teacher relished in depriving us of the hopeful glance at the clock. If any of us were to mistakenly glance up at the clock out of habit, we would see its circular frame covered by a white piece of paper with stark black letters that read:

TIME IS PASSING, BUT ARE YOU?

“It’s for your own good,” my teacher would say. “Looking at the clock takes away from learning the class material. If you can’t pay attention, how do you expect to do well in this class?”

Now that I am seven years past the horrors of eighth-grade Latin, I have found myself overlooking the sadistic origins of my teacher’s words and returning, instead, to their basic meaning:

Time is passing, but are you?

It’s a question that hits hard as a senior, staring out at the hazy expanse of my final year of university. It has plagued my every thought as I move through the first few episodes of my final season at BC: the first day of school, the first football game, the first club meetings. My thoughts lead me to the future, where I wonder if I have all the skills I need to tackle life beyond the Heights. My thoughts also lead me to the past, where I ponder if I have really made the most of my experience. Would freshman-year Punnya be proud of me now?

In short, for anyone asking, yes, the senior-year existentialism is real. I am two res-walks away from becoming Plato himself.

But in all seriousness, the reason the words of my eighth-grade teacher have been echoing in my head is because they reflect a paradox I have become all too familiar with lately: thinking of time will not prepare you for its inevitable passage. While my rush to consider the past and the future has been rooted in the desire to make the most of my final year at BC, it has not changed the fact that time is passing regardless of my thoughts on the matter. 

Time passes even as I type these words. Time passes as I worry about time passing. Time passes as I ponder what to do about time passing. If all of history’s most brilliant minds could do nothing to stop the passage of time, what chance do I have?

And so I am left with no choice but to stay here, in the present. In the passage of each moment. In every memory, pocket of connection, and ornery experience. I must make a commitment to take it all in and savor it as one does with precious things. I must stay present, allow time to pass, and reframe my fears about making the most of it.

To anyone reading this, especially my fellow seniors, know that I write this just as much for myself as I do for you. Whether the existential agony has evaded you entirely, retreated to the recesses of your mind, or exploded in full force at the start of the year, it is all okay. We will make the most of the time we have by simply existing in the journey of it all. 

And so I invite you to join me in planting my feet in the grass, taking a deep breath in, and letting this final year of undergrad unfold in the most beautiful of ways.

After all, time is passing, and so are we.