Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future. Steve Miller wasn’t wrong, was he? That line has haunted more people than they’d care to admit, often at the least poetic moments, like realising it’s Tuesday when you’d swear it was still Sunday, or when you glance at the calendar and discover that baby-faced intern you mentored just bought a house and has a child named after a PS4 game character…
The trouble with time is that it doesn’t care how organised you are. It has no interest in your Google Calendar or your fancy planner with colour-coded tabs. It doesn’t pause when you say, “Just one more thing before I…” It doesn’t wait for you to be ready, or confident, or comfortable. Time just keeps moving, smugly, like the last chocolate biscuit at a boardroom meeting being quietly taken while you’re still deciding whether to reach for it.
In business, it shows up most treacherously in the form of drift. You had every intention to follow up with that promising lead from three months ago. You meant to check in on your old colleague who launched her start-up. You promised yourself you’d write that bold, unapologetic proposal that would shake things up. But instead, you got buried in spreadsheets, half-read newsletters, and ‘quick calls’ that lasted exactly as long as the Hundred Years’ War. Then, all at once, the opportunity is gone. The lead has gone cold, the start-up has been acquired, and the proposal now feels about as relevant as a fax machine in a forest.
Friendships suffer from time-slip too, often so gradually it feels like waking up to find the tide has come in and your shoes are floating out to sea. You keep meaning to send that message. To book that dinner. To reply properly, not just with a heart emoji or a thumbs up. You tell yourself they know you care. Of course they do. But time, in its slippery silence, tests that theory. One day you look at their feed and they’ve moved, married, become a beekeeper, and you weren’t there for any of it. It wasn’t meant to be neglect. It was just life, stacked up like unread emails.
And then, there’s the one who matters. The one whose messages you re-read, whose silence you interpret in three different ways before breakfast. The one you thought you’d have more time with. Maybe you thought you’d circle back to them when life was less complicated. Maybe you assumed they’d still be there after the storm, after the noise, after you’d fixed everything else. But time doesn’t wait for the perfect conditions. It doesn’t care that you weren’t ready, or that you were scared, or that you thought they’d always know how much they meant, even if you didn’t say it out loud.
It’s easy to believe there will be more chances. That tomorrow will be better timed, better lit, better scripted. But tomorrow has a slippery little habit of turning into next week, and then next year, and then never. That’s the trick of time. It slips, yes, but often because we let it. We distract ourselves with the unimportant, convinced we’re being responsible. We prioritise the loudest emails, not the most meaningful ones. We tell ourselves we’re too tired to say what we really feel, forgetting that someday we might be too late.
The only real defence we have is presence. Messy, inconvenient, gloriously human presence. Not the curated, scheduled sort. The now. The “I’ll send that message now.” The “Let’s just call them now.” The “I adore you” said without perfect timing or moonlight or violins. The biscuit reached for before it’s gone. The chance taken. The small risk made while the moment is still warm.
Because time is a thief, but we are not helpless victims. We are the ones who choose where to look, who to hold close, what to act on, and what to let slip. The Steve Miller Band were right, and they were wrong. Time does keep slippin’ into the future, but it’s not just floating off on its own. We’re sometimes enabling that draft, with every moment we delay, every affection we leave unspoken, every dream we file under “someday”.
Carpe diem isn’t a slogan, it’s an intervention. It’s a tug on your sleeve, a whisper in your ear: now is good enough. Now is happening. Now is all we’ve got.
So send the message. Make the call. Say the bold thing. Reach for the biscuit. The future is coming, yes, but this minute is yours. Use it well.
