Take Your Time

I almost died last year. 

I realize that might be jarring to read right out of the gate, but we might as well start there. 

Last year, I went to the doctor for a routine eye appointment and one thing led to another and I was eventually diagnosed with a brain tumor. Within a week of my diagnosis, I underwent brain surgery to remove the tumor. That initial surgery led to multiple life-threatening complications, which resulted in 4 total surgeries and 5 hospitalizations. And now I’m living and going about my everyday, forever changed by those near-death moments.

But today, I want to write about one of the most significant changes I’ve experienced since almost dying in case you, reader, haven’t had the chance to almost die yet.

The thing with almost dying is that you don’t necessarily know you’re there in the moment. I knew I was sick. I knew my body wasn’t working and I was slipping into unconsciousness or bleeding out, or my head might split open from the pain, but there was usually a sense of “I’m sure this is ok. I’ll be ok.” 

It wasn’t until after those moments, once I was stable enough to process what I’d experienced, that I understood how close I was to losing my life, and that’s a strange thing to realize in such a tangible way. To see the lab numbers on a screen showing how close you were to not making it or to hear about the doctors who let your mom say a final goodbye, not sure if you’d be waking up, it all feels a bit like something out of a movie, something that doesn’t actually happen to people. But it did happen to me.

So with my near-death moments as the backdrop, let’s talk about time.

Time is one of life’s true constants, yet somehow it feels finicky and unreliable. We all come into this world using the same measures for time- minutes, hours, days, years, yet sometimes minutes feel like hours and years feel like days. People write songs or poems about lost time, borrowed time, stolen time. Religion teaches us about endless time, eternal bliss as a prize for good behavior. 

At any given moment, most humans are looking for ways to have more time. We pour energy and effort and resources into miracle cures and death-defying medical research. I’m living proof of what this research can offer, the extra time that it can give. 

Even though I have experienced time just like many of the humans around me, sometimes begging for it to slow down and other times wishing it could speed up or skip a few beats, ever since I almost died, time has felt different. 

Because time only feels like a scarce resource when you’re worried about losing it, and I’m not scared of losing it anymore, at least when it comes to my life. 

I guess it’s a fairly common thing after a near-death experience to lose your fear of death. Others in the near-death community talk about it and I’ve read articles that seem to agree. There’s debate on whether it’s a trauma response or a healthy mindset shift, but I’m going with the healthy option because I have enough trauma to deal with already. 

While I’m sure it’s not the same for everyone, there seems to be something about having the real, actual encounter with death that creates a prolonged sense of letting go. We have come to realize on some level that losing time, or earthly time ending, is not as bad as we thought it might be. Though I would not recommend the suffering right before it. 0/10

Along with realizing that time ending is not the scary thing I always thought it might be, I feel a sense of letting go in the perceived control over my time. We don’t actually get to control how much time we have, but our brains like to keep us in the belief that we do. There’s probably a good amount of evolutionary benefit to this. We need to feel like a fight for time is necessary so we prolong it for our species. Our brains tell us that if we eat healthy, follow the doctor’s orders, get our yearly checkups, we’ll buy ourselves more time. And sometimes that’s true, so we do it. But other times, it’s not true and we lose time anyway. 

So how has this “letting go” impacted me since my near-death moments? It has given me the chance to live in my time, to go with the flow of time instead of assuming time will always be available to me or that I have any control over it. 

It’s Yours.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting across from a client who was having a hard time processing a difficult memory. She paused, her eyes welling with tears, then apologized for her emotions and the silence. I said a phrase that I would usually say to clients in a moment like this. “It’s Ok. You’re doing great. Take your time.” and in the silence that followed as she continued to process, I felt that phrase go through my mind over and over again, almost like I had never heard it before.

“Take your time.” In a very literal way, this was my client’s time. For the next 24 minutes of her session, it was her time to use, her time to take. She could process exactly as slowly or quickly as she needed and she’d still get the same 55 minutes that she was paying me for. “Take your time.” While I believe I meant it to be comforting, was also, in that moment, a real desire I had for her. Take your time, dear one, take the time that is yours to heal. 

Since that day, that phrase has continued to pop into my mind like a poem. I find myself deconstructing every word. Take. Your. Time. The way we use it means to slow down or be intentional, but it’s spoken as a command, a gentle request for ownership, a reminder that your time will always be yours and only yours to take. You were born with time. We were all born with time. It’s on us to take it, to live in it, and to flow with it. 

We could spend a lot of our time fighting to keep it, fearing the loss of it. It’s pretty natural to find ourselves there. We find ways to cope, often using religion as a way to bypass or soothe our fears. And then we encounter the loss of a loved one or someone else’s time-ending journey and it’s terrifying to imagine living more time without them. Of course it is.

But what would happen if we could let go and take the time that is ours? Harness it and embrace it and nourish it. Stop fighting against it (I’m looking at you “anti-aging”) and let go. Flow with it, fully accepting that time ending will happen to us all and we might not even notice when it does. 

What if instead of living like we are dying (which sounds great in a song but never felt practical or sustainable to me), we live like we have time to take? Like we have time that is just ours to use. Just mine. Just yours.

I was given a chance at more time through the hands of competent doctors, researchers, medical advancements, and medications and I’ll do my best to keep it going as long as I can, living my life as a show of gratitude to all those who came before me to give me this time.

But then someday, you and I will finish our time and let it go. And it’ll be more peaceful and more OK than we ever thought possible.

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Published on September 03, 2025 06:00
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