Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

-Pink Floyd

 Being present in the moment seems to the big thing that we are supposed to concentrate on these days. There is omnipresent advice that we should all put our phone down and come up for air every now and then. Heck, even the meditation app on my phone tells me to do this as I find myself toggling around endlessly. For me, this conduct of presence is much like my belief that I do a proper stretching cooldown after run: in practice, I think more about doing it than actually performing the act.

I’m writing this from northern Australia—the “top end” as the Aussies it. I got here after an extremely long journey that necessitated a series of time slots that I needed to withstand before I was spat out into the southern hemisphere.  Armed with 12 New Yorker magazines (I frequently fall behind in my subscription), crosswords, a short book and even my notebook, I felt well-equipped to meet this 25-hour travel odyssey with a pleasant attitude.

But the thing with traveling is that this limbo time leaves me with little interest for these kinds of distractions. Unless a book is really good, I will instead spend the airplane and airport raking through my latest thoughts and life quandaries. It’s not exactly productive, but for some reason travel for me is akin to watching a paint of coat dry: I might not be able to touch it, but I can stand back and stare to see if things are drying to my satisfaction.

My first layover on the way to Sydney was through the Munich Airport. I’ve been through there before, but on this occasion I made an effort to walk the terminal with an obsessive compulsive streak because I knew that my flight to Bangkok would leave me immobilized. I got to one end of the terminal, and I found it nearly deserted. I looked at my watch. Still 45 minutes before we were to board. My carryon shoulder bag was fairly heavy, but still, I wanted to walk. So I continued.

As it got closer and closer to boarding time, I started to stick closer to the gate. This one was located in the middle of the terminal, and while there were loads of travelers waiting to board the 747, I heard a strange manner of banging and clanging near the gate. As it turns out, just across the boarding area was a small walkthrough exhibit of sorts. The walls were painted blue and I read the big letters across the side: “Zeit”.

I opened up my phone to a webpage I keep that is used for my constant translation word searches. I usually find myself looking up French or Italian words, but for the first time ever I toggled over to German. “Zeit”, according to the Internet, meant “time” or “as long as I live.”

Walking inside of the boxed-in exhibit, the walls were painted a dreamy blue like the kind you’d see in a Saint-Exupéry story. There was a small array of ancient timekeeping pieces: a chaotic pendulum, hourglasses, a merkhet, and a sundial. There was even a mousetrap-looking apparatus with wheels and sounds made for the children travelers that moved things around with glee as parents looked on. We were all killing time.

I thought it quite clever of the Germans to install this small display in the airport. What better place than an international airport for a load of people to reflect on things then by putting the word TIME up in big letters in multiple languages? It worked for me, and I started to think about how often I carve up time like I actually own and control it. How I so often look at life as a series of evolutions or wake-ups that I trust will grant me some status that I very much look forward to and expect.

But time doesn’t work that way, no matter how good we are at dressing it up in its many faces.

I spent a good amount of my journey traveling to Australia thinking about what I’d like out of life, and—thanks to my brief stay in Munich—I thought about how I might not have the time or resource to achieve it all. Forget about to being present in the moment; if there is something that I want to do or say, then it’s best that I get on with it. No one owns an hourglass with an inexhaustible supply of sand that drains down from the top.

When I say all of this, I’m not talking about how I need to get super crazy and travel to more weirdo places. Or that I need to embark on some other of sort of bucket listy thing that seems cool. That Great Race kind of crap is meaningless to me. I instead thought of time’s reminder as a kick in the ass to remember to accomplish the everyday things that are important.

Once off of my flight from Munich, I had two hours in which to loitering in the Bangkok Airport. I turned on my phone, the thing that is so good at providing distraction. I opted to make a video call, despite my sleep deprived state. Soon greeted with the smile of my father. He had been texting me old family photos of his grandparents, and I suddenly felt homesick. As usual, he answered his phone and then proceeded to pats down his hair as if he were looking in a mirror. This makes me smile. Time waits for no one, and these split-second moments are the ones that I love best. And they may or may not be at my disposal as the great clock continues to run.

There were other things that I did too as I continued to think about time while wandering Suvarnabhumi Airport. There were other people I thought about, present situations that I considered. The future, while it is not promised, still must be reckoned with and planned for. I thought about that too. And by the time I got to Sydney some ten hours later, I couldn’t exactly say that I felt any greater clarity for my life and where it was going. But I did appreciate the cosmic kick in the ass.

I know that as I continue to move forward—traveling, working, loving and smartphone scrolling—that I will inevitably slip back into forgetfulness. Complacency. And I think that this is a part of it all. I don’t want to live each moment feeling as though life is slipping through my fingers. But at the same time, I do want to try and make each decision in a way that is thoughtful and hopefully wise. I honestly don’t think I am there yet, but I’m going to keep on trying. Or I will just keep booking trips back to Munich Airport.