More Time

I've had a song on repeat for the past few weeks. I'm the kind of person for whom this happens-- one song just gets lodged somewhere in me and I listen to it over and over. It becomes the background soundtrack to my life, on repeat.  This one is "Love Sick Doctor" by Thunder Jackson. A bit of an incongruous choice, I can't explain why it's been with me.  At the beginning of the track there is this kind of weird spoken voice, it feels conversational.  He says: "I just wish we had more time."

And I noticed at some point that every time I hear that particular line, I feel a little something before I think anything about it. A little catch in the back of my throat. That feeling that arrives just before tears, though tears don't come. What is that feeling? It's not exactly grief and it's not exactly nostalgia. It's an ache. A tenderness. Listening to that line at the opening of the song feels almost like pressing on a bruise. There is something painful in it, but also something pleasurable.

And from there, memories begin to arise. Friends I've drifted from but still think about often. People I've loved deeply. Different chapters of my life. My children when they were small enough to fit into footie pajamas and fall asleep curled against me. The feeling seems connected to all of them, but it isn't really about the memories themselves. It's more like a recognition of the good things in life and their fleeting quality.

Perhaps that is why this feeling seems especially close to the surface this time of year. This is the season of graduations, weddings, transitions... the opening and closing of chapters. I remember my own high school senior spring and the strange dual awareness it held: fully inside the experience, and already aware that someday I would miss it. I remember recognizing, even as it was happening, that it would someday exist only as a memory.

And right now in ordinary life, that awareness accumulates behind the tasks of the day. There is a pretty constant recognition in me that I can count on one hand the number of years until both of my children graduate high school. That thought can float through at any time and nothing changes in the moment except perception. I might be staring at the unmade bed and or asking about homework. We might be laughing at dinner or racing to get to soccer practice. Yet something shifts. Perception is not nothing. Time becomes more visible.

I am acutely aware that this doesn't pull me away from the moment. Quite the opposite, it pulls me into it. It makes me pay attention. An ordinary conversation feels more significant. A mundane carpool feels more precious. Awareness of time's limits seems to deepen my experience of the time itself.

I've been turning this over in my mind for weeks now. Is time something we simply move through, or is it something we experience differently depending on how we are organized internally? Because there certainly seem to be moments when time expands and contracts. Five minutes waiting for a doctor can feel like an hour. An hour laughing with friends can disappear in what feels like moments. A childhood summer can feel endless. A decade can vanish. A single conversation can remain vivid for twenty years while entire months leave almost no trace.

Recently I came across a study in embodied psychology that caught my attention because it seemed to touch this exact question. Researchers were exploring the relationship between interoception—our ability to sense internal bodily states such as breath, heartbeat, hunger, and subtle shifts in sensation—and time perspective, which refers to how we orient ourselves toward the past, present, and future.

Interoception is increasingly understood as more than a sensory process. Researchers believe it contributes to emotional awareness, self-regulation, and even our sense of being a continuous self moving through time. In this study, the researchers found that individuals with greater interoceptive awareness tended to have a more balanced and flexible time perspective. Rather than becoming stuck in past rumination or future anticipation, they appeared better able to move fluidly among past, present, and future.

The study doesn't answer the question of what time is, nor does it suggest that awareness somehow changes the passage of clock time. But it does raise an intriguing possibility: that our experience of time may be shaped, at least in part, by our awareness of the body.

That made me think of yoga.

So much of yoga is really a practice of interoception. Again and again we return attention to sensation, breath, contact, effort, and ease. We learn to notice what is happening inside us rather than moving through experience on autopilot. We train awareness.

If awareness of the body influences awareness of time, then perhaps yoga is doing something more than helping us become stronger, calmer, or more flexible. Perhaps it is subtly changing our relationship to time itself.

I find myself reluctant to draw a neat conclusion here because the question feels larger than the answer. The more I sit with it, the more interested I become in the relationship between awareness and experience. Maybe what I am noticing when I hear that line—"I just wish we had more time"—isn't simply longing. Maybe it is also recognition: recognition that the moments that seem richest are often the moments we are most awake for; recognition that awareness of impermanence can make life feel more vivid rather than less; recognition that some moments seem to contain more life than others.

I don't know whether awareness expands time. I don't know whether consciousness changes our experience of time or whether those are ultimately the same thing. What I do know is that when I hear that line, my mind fans out in a hundred directions. Every place it goes leads me toward something meaningful: people who have meant so much to me, relationships that shaped me, moments with my children, seasons of life that still live somewhere inside me. The feeling is bittersweet, but it is also strangely enlivening.

It makes me more aware of the richness that exists right now and i feel a desire to connect more deeply, pay closer attention, linger a little longer.

I am curious about this practice of awareness itself. If interoception can shift our relationship with time, even subtly, that feels worth paying attention to in a very real way. Not because it helps us escape the fleeting nature of life, but because I notice when I am aware that time is passing quickly, I tend to become more present for what is actually happening. And in that kind of attention, it is almost as if time itself slows down.

Further Reading: This reflection was inspired in part by the paper Bridging Interoception and Time Perspective: Toward an Embodied Model of Consciousness by Olga Klamut and Simon Weissenberger (2026).