Racing Through Life, Missing the Moments
I often find myself reflecting on whether we—adults and children alike—truly have the chance to enjoy life amidst schedules, screens, and endless deadlines. Life is not a 100-metre dash, and not everyone was born to shatter records or hoard accolades. While ambition and achievement matter, our obsession with success risks sprinting past the very life we are meant to inhabit.
A slow weekend morning feels almost subversive: tea steaming gently in a cup, newspapers scattered across the garden table, dew shimmering on the grass, and my cat stretching languidly in the sun, yawning with an air of complete entitlement. Today, I felt an irresistible urge to play my guitar—and I did—allowing the familiar, vibrant chords to resonate through the quiet and remind me that I still have the touch. As the music lingered, I thought of George Harrison’s words with The Beatles: "Here comes the sun, and I say, it’s all right," and I leaned back, letting time expand, unhurried, for once.
Life wasn’t always this frantic. Back then, time moved at a gentler pace: growing up in Allahabad, afternoons drifted at the speed of a ceiling fan—deliberate, measured, generous. Later, as a young teacher in Pune, evenings stretched into billiards games, idle chatter, and long-playing Beatles records, which we listened to from start to finish, without shuffle, skipping, or algorithms dictating the next track. Life contained pauses, silences, and the spaces between the notes, a luxury almost unimaginable today.
Now, everyone is perpetually in motion, rushing from one back-to-back meeting to the next, swallowing fast food in a single gulp, inhaling, devouring, wolfing it down like a competitive sport, while creases are etched across brows and bags swell beneath eyes that seldom see sunlight—all courtesy of our modern holy trinity: laptop, TV, phone. Pills are popped to offset ever-depleted energy, and umpteen cups of caffeinated drinks keep vitality dripping like IVs in hospitals. Even words are shortened to acronyms and emoji—but what are we doing with the time saved? Ask around: almost everyone is perpetually exhausted, stress has become a byword, and if you’re successful, you’re stressed. Something doesn’t click, and I don’t think I’m wrong.
Driving has ceased to be travel; it has become a high-stakes endurance event, horns blaring like war drums, airports transformed into conveyor belts of fatigue, and trains and planes hurtling along while passengers hurtle through inboxes, social media, and urgent group chats. The world itself has become a maelstrom of motion, frenzy, and minor panic; at this rate, I am left pondering the future—will our children one day commute via teleportation pods while simultaneously attending five meetings in zero gravity?
And, as if to taunt us, scientists say the Earth is literally spinning faster on its axis than before, shaving milliseconds off our days, perhaps explaining our obsession with “instant”: instant coffee, instant noodles, instant downloads, instant messaging, instant everything—except, ironically, instant serenity.
And while I sit—the old man I am—and ruminate, there are those already partly exhausted, partly disillusioned, who have accomplished! (Yes, joke intended.) Somewhere along the way, life became a checklist, and we forgot that joy cannot be ticked off.
Perfection has other dimensions. It is not only quantified by achievements, grades, or Instagram-worthy lives; it resides in laughter that leaves your ribs aching, lying back to watch cloud-animals drift across the sky, or listening to a child invent a game that makes perfect sense to them—these are the trophies that endure.
Don’t mistake me: I am not suggesting we abandon effort, discipline, or ambition—these are essential to growth and achievement. But as an educator, I see too often that ceaseless activity and a relentless chase for perfection do not equal learning, fulfillment, or true success. Excellence is measured not only by accomplishments, but by balance, presence, and the ability to savor life along the way.
Perhaps time hasn’t actually shortened; it is our relationship with it that has changed. Once, we lived life like an LP record: patient, deliberate, each song flowing seamlessly into the next. Now we live on shuffle, always clicking “next,” never hearing the tune through.
Here’s the truth: nobody remembers the “greatest person alive,” mainly because there never was one; what endures are the moments we gave, the time we shared, the laughter we sparked, the stillness we allowed ourselves to inhabit.
So stop sprinting. Step back. Slow down, and let life be measured not by checklists, screens, or accolades but by presence, by the ordinary joys we too often overlook; for if we do not recalibrate, we risk raising a generation that knows only frenzy, never pause, never the music between the notes, and then, one day, we may look around and realize that in our race for perfection, we have forgotten how to live
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