”Time After Time” is one of my favorite songs. When Cyndi Lauper’s voice fires up, all my masculinity disappears, and this human emerges, and he’s as lost in the fourth dimension as anyone else.

Time might be one of my favorite words, not because it’s the most pretty word. It’s not even a word that’s shaped like what it is. The hard stop, the long i, the silent e, the mouth ending closed on the m, the t barely audible like the tick of a worn clock. Time. I like it as a word because there’s an unlikely warmth to it, and then there’s an abrupt end to it, despite its mysterious, open-ended, and possibly eternal meaning. Time.

Time management is at the core of my job. I am the governance coordinator for dozens of organizations that address homelessness. I’m constantly working with my agency’s schedule, other agencies’ schedules, my schedule, and all the individual schedules in between. The day is a blur of deadlines.

Sometimes, I miss deadlines, and I meet or beat most of them. But even when I lose or win the deadline, there’s always the next deadline and tomorrow. Time is strict but permissive, inflexible but forgiving. It’s always on the move but seemingly stationary.

I realized yesterday while navigating the rabbit hole of calendars and schedules as the workday passed, that time is a limited resource that an unlimited number of people can share. We’re always running out of it, yet we always have plenty left.

It feels like I spend two seconds planning to spend one second well—that a single second spent was the outcome of three seconds. And when this ratio bugs me, and I abandon plans, I wind up wasting more than 3 seconds. It’s like I’m paying back tomorrow, and tomorrow is accruing interest on time I haven’t borrowed or spent. As the sand falls, each grain is a calculated debt I’m paying off as I go somewhen. It doesn’t move up the hourglass. Only down. Sometimes, the time we have is the only time we’ve had, and by the time we have it, it slips through our palms one grain at a time, and it’s already leaving, and then, poof, it’s gone.

Am I counting down, or am I elapsing? Am I losing ground, or am I accumulating? Is all I had fading into entropy, or am I adding up until I burst at the seems? I’m watching the passage of events, not knowing if what I’m observing is an illusion, or if observation itself is illusory.

The sweeping of the second hand ever-marks the moments that take eternities, and the years that move like rusted springs, and the years that sweep like second hands, and the seconds that