When I need to be somewhere at a certain hour, I feel a pressure to rush that unmoors me. The problem is that the pressure can mount at 10 a.m. when I don’t need to be anywhere until 6 p.m.

You better get ready!! my body alerts me. If you want to make it on time! But it’s 10 a.m., I think. 10 a.m.? What does that even mean? You need to GET READY.

I know logistically when I need to leave to arrive somewhere at 6 p.m., but somehow, upon waking, my relationship to time disintegrates.

I struggle to judge how long it will take me to get ready, even though I do it every day. While I’m trying to work out when to leave, what to wear, and what needs doing before I go, it’s suddenly past the point when I should have left.

When I rush to catch a train, I feel as though I’m moving too slowly, that I can’t quite make my body go fast enough. My movements seem inadequate to the urgency I feel. I am trying to catch up with time, but time is pulling away from me.

The strange thing is that time itself seems to change quality. The possibility of being late becomes something almost physical, a force that draws me toward it. I feel as though I’m caught in a vortex, something I might never get out of. Being late is no longer simply a matter of arriving after the appointed hour. It becomes a state I’m falling into, and the closer I get to it, the harder it is to escape.

Anxiety is often described as fear about what might happen. But anxiety also changes our experience of the conditions in which we live. Time, which ordinarily provides the structure within which we act, becomes unstable. I can read a clock. I understand what the numbers mean. What I lose is my ability to translate that knowledge into an accurate sense of the time available to me.

Research on anxiety and time perception suggests that anxiety can alter how we estimate durations and attend to the passage of time. But I am interested in something beyond the question of how anxious people perceive minutes. I want to know what makes the quality of time change, what turns a deadline into a physical force? How does the future exert pressure on the present, so that the present becomes a place you feel trapped inside?

This is one of the peculiarities of anxiety: it makes abstract conditions feel concrete, material. I am not simply thinking about time. I am caught inside it.

Is there a trick to walking alongside time rather than being caught inside it?

I’m not the only one who seeks to understand what time is.

When the science historian James Gleick was around six years old, he asked his mom, Beth Youman Gleick, the same question.

“What is time?”

She responded by writing a children’s book called Time Is When.

Nearly ten years ago, an old friend, knowing about my tortured relationship to time, purchased a copy of this rare edition for me. 

This book remains one of the most meaningful gifts anyone has given me, and it’s a cherished possession.

Here’s a peek inside this glorious book.

Isn’t that just delightful?

Until next week, I will remain…