Lost in Time, Found in Meaning

So it began.

Around this time last year, I penned down my thoughts on a bubblegum pink-coloured Post-it about how the year had flown past so quickly. And now, in 2025, just like that, June will arrive in less than a week. Seasons will change, and bones will settle like wood. I recall carrying many digging questions last year when scribbling on that Post-it, and while this year has provided me with much-needed clarity and certainty, my questioning has not stopped.

In fact, I’ve generated a new set of questions I seek explanations for… again.

Amidst all my musings, a repetitive theme was time. Or at least my understanding of it.

The Dilemma of Time

Time was slipping away before I knew it; time was wasted, and time became a metaphorical repository for moments, people, and conversations. This recurring realisation—at various points—that time was getting ahead of me (and thus, the sense of feeling lost) led to my awareness of something I had never consciously analysed before: my belief that familiarity was the result of spending a substantial amount of time on something.

The more time, the more exposure (conversations, meetings, repetition), and therefore, more camaraderie—inevitably resulting in a sense of familiarity. It felt like simple math.

But are familiarity and time truly intrinsically connected?

Over the past few years, I’ve found that things I had never done, or people I had never met, could somehow feel deeply familiar. Likewise, things I had done many times before suddenly felt cold and new. If time and familiarity were truly bound together, this shouldn’t be possible—but it was.

These constant, enervating oscillations between finding things familiar one moment and entirely foreign the next brought me to a rather muzzy state of being—lost in time.

Lost in Time

What a direful state this is!

And yet, not quite as dramatic as it sounds—nor is it as perilous to one’s mental state as one might think. To a certain extent, being lost in time is essential to understanding what one truly seeks.

Let me explain.

The past two years have been filled with change—goodbyes, shifting places, meeting new people, gaining new experiences (both good and difficult), and not having nearly enough time to process any of it. The lack of downtime and the pressure to function flawlessly meant that I had to compromise on my dear friend: familiarity.

The Mind-Bending Discussion

As mentioned earlier, I had always assumed familiarity was proportional to time. The longer I spent doing something, the more familiar I assumed I was with it. However, it quickly became evident that time is not directly proportional to familiarity—at least, not for me.

This, inevitably, leads to a deeper question: What is familiarity? Or rather—what is meaningful familiarity? The kind that strikes a chord, moves us, makes an impact, and creates a sense of home in unexpected places.

I stress meaningful because that word has surfaced repeatedly in my heart this year. Could it be that familiarity results not from duration, but from meaningful engagement? Does something feel more familiar simply because it resonates with our soul?

After much pondering, I find this to be a reasonable explanation for the newfound familiarity I’ve experienced with new people, places, and practices. And for the lack of familiarity I’ve felt with things I’ve long known.

Maybe it’s not about how much time is spent—but about how meaningfully it is spent.

The Search for Meaning (or Home)

We often hear people say, “Ten years have passed, and nothing has changed,” or “This place feels foreign to me now.” And I’ve always wondered—why do they feel this way, after years of immersion?

Perhaps our innate need to seek familiarity is actually a gentle nudge from within, a call to seek something deeper—to find meaning. Could it be that the search for familiarity is actually the search for resonance, connection, and belonging?

And if so, this is an encouraging thought: in a transient world, where people come and go and routines shift like the tide, we could still feel at home—not because we’ve stayed long, but because we’ve stayed present.

Maybe familiarity is not something earned through the ticking of the clock.
Maybe familiarity is something we assign.
Maybe familiarity is something we feel when we find meaning.