Noticing Time
Updated: Aug 20
“It’s not just that time feels shorter. It feels more visible.”
Most of us move through time without thinking much about it.
Days fill. Schedules move. Life unfolds at a pace we rarely stop to question. Time sits quietly in the background. “I’ll get around to that at some point. There’s always tomorrow.” We assume time will continue, and we rarely feel the need to examine it.
Until something happens that brings it into clearer view.
In my work with people facing cancer, I sit with them in the spaces between.
Between appointments.
Between scans.
Between knowing and not knowing.
Waiting becomes a central part of the experience of cancer. Waiting for results. Waiting to feel better. Waiting to see if what you have endured is working.
And in that waiting, time starts to feel different.
It moves closer. It becomes harder to ignore.
Waiting in this context isn’t neutral. It carries uncertainty, hope, fear, and a sharp awareness of how much may be at stake.
Time can shift shape in this space.
Some days, it seems to stretch out: a clock that seemingly won’t move, an afternoon that feels like it lasts a week, a wait for results that feels longer than the months that came before it.
Other days, it compresses: a week that disappears in a blur of appointments, a month that’s gone before you have time to feel it, an entire season that ends without you ever quite arriving inside it.
And the future, which you may have once assumed simply keeps unfolding, can become harder to picture. You may cautiously make plans for the near future. Or you may find you can no longer make plans at all — at least not in the way you used to. Instead, the future shows up as what could be missed. The grandchild’s birthday. The trip that was supposed to happen. The years you had assumed would be there.
Time, which had been in the background for so long, is suddenly something you can’t stop being aware of.
It’s not that time has suddenly changed.
It’s your relationship to it that has.
Time is no longer assumed. It's noticed. Felt. Measured more carefully than it ever needed to be before.
And in that noticing, something inside you begins to shift.
Patients often tell me that they don’t want to waste their time.
You may become more aware of how you’re spending your days. Time that once passed without much thought begins to register differently. A growing awareness emerges —not just that time is passing, but that it matters.
Choice begins to come into clearer view too, in small, everyday moments that used to pass without much thought.
How to spend an afternoon.
Whether to say yes to something, or no.
Where to place your energy.
Who to call back. Who not to.
When time was less visible, many of these choices happened without fanfare. Now, they ask for something more. Attention. Intention.
Someone once told me —
“I’m being more intentional about how I spend myself.”
Spend myself. Not spend my time. There’s a whole philosophy in that small grammatical shift.
When time matters more, what fills time begins to matter more too.
And in that recognition, things can begin to reorganize.
Priorities shift. Tolerance for what feels unnecessary fades. Moments that once seemed small begin to take on greater meaning. Sitting outside, feeling the sun. The texture of a familiar voice on the phone. Watching the world move at its own pace. They begin to matter differently.
But the reorganization isn’t always gentle.
Often, what becomes clearer is also harder to face. A job that no longer feels worth the years it’s asking for. A relationship that’s been slowly draining you for a long time. A way of spending your energy that you had stopped questioning, and that now feels impossible to keep doing.
When time becomes visible, so does what no longer fits inside it.
That can be liberating. It can also be sobering. It can ask you to have conversations you’ve been avoiding, or to make choices that other people in your life may not understand. It’s not always easy to know what to do with the clarity.
But the clarity itself is information. And it’s yours.
Waiting, in this way, does something unexpected.
It slows the outward movement of life, and it sharpens the inward experience of it.
You may find yourself paying closer attention to small things. A morning. A meal. The light through a window. A face you have known for years that you suddenly find yourself looking at, really looking at, for the first time in a long time.
This is what can happen when time stops being invisible.
If time feels more visible to you now, you might ask yourself this question:
What feels worth my time today?
Not as a measure of whether you’re using time well. Just as a question to sit with, in the moments when sitting with it feels possible.
Time may not feel the same as it once did.
And in that shift, you may begin to choose more carefully — not only what you give your time to, but how you give yourself within it.
You may not be able to control how much time you have.
But you can begin to notice how you’re living inside it.
Reflections on the inner psychological experience of living alongside cancer.
Jae L. Ross, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist who works with individuals and families whose lives have been reshaped by cancer, helping them navigate the emotional challenges of diagnosis, treatment, and beyond.
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