Written somewhere between top of climb and top of descent.
ETA – 3 h 29 m | Top of Climb
Seat 15D. Aisle — always the aisle. And thank goodness for the empty seat beside me. Paxing home after a week of flying feels like stepping into someone else’s rhythm — familiar, but slower.
Before the flight I queued a few movies and YouTube clips, just in case. The seat-belt sign stayed on longer than usual; I could feel the aircraft climbing into the jet stream — a few soft bumps as we settled in. Ah, time. This will be a fast flight, they said.
Funny how that works. Just forty-eight hours ago I flew the same route the other way — into the headwinds — five hours and thirty-seven minutes. Tonight we’ll do it in under four. Even for a pilot used to it, that difference still amazes me. The same distance, the same sky, yet such a change in time.
The hum steadies now, that velvet sound that marks the moment of cruise. I open the laptop — maybe I’ll write this week’s Perspectives article. Three hours and forty-seven minutes to destination. Enough time, surely.
The sun is dipping, sliding off the wing in a long copper streak. It looks different up here — softer somehow, slower. The light is different… is time?
When I’m flying, I don’t usually notice it passing — the focus narrows, the work takes over. Yet sometimes I do. A five-hour sector can crawl one day and disappear the next. Maybe time itself doesn’t change — only how deeply I’m inside it.
Outside, the sky shifts from gold to a pale silver-blue. From up here, it’s hard to tell if the world is racing past or perfectly still.
ETA – 2 h 45 m | Cruise — The Simulator Paradox
Somewhere over the desert, the light outside turns thin and pink, fading through layers of cloud like brushed metal. The cabin is quiet — just the clink of glasses, a child’s laugh a few rows back, and the endless hum of engines. It’s cathartic and reassuring, that sound — a reminder that motion continues even when thought stands still.
My mind drifts forward two weeks to the simulator. The preparation starts early, half-conscious. I’m already rehearsing flows, memory items, the cadence of call-outs. It’s not anxiety, just the mind tuning itself.
Right now, that thought makes time feel slow. But in the simulator, time collapses. Two hours vanish in what feels like twenty minutes, yet within them every action slows — each movement crisp, every decision suspended in deliberate focus.
That’s the paradox of deep concentration: the clock keeps running, but you’re not in it.
Focus folds time inward; you don’t escape it — you enter it more completely.
When the instructor finally says, “That’s it,” the lights outside the simulator feel too bright, as though you’ve surfaced from another layer of reality.
ETA – 2 h 03 m | Cruise — The Movie Effect
The light has thinned to amber, sliding through the cabin in quiet bands that glow across tray tables and faces half-lit by screens. Outside, the sky holds that high-altitude stillness — pale at the horizon, endless above.
The same thing happens in the movie theatres. You sit down, the world fades, and you enter another reality. Two and a half hours later the credits roll, and you blink — surprised. It felt quick, but it wasn’t short.
We’ve all lived that moment — the gentle disorientation when the lights return. You weren’t ignoring time; you just stopped measuring it. You were inside something whole.
It’s the same with a conversation that drifts from laughter to quiet without anyone noticing the minutes. Or a piece of music that seems to suspend the world. Those moments always end too soon, yet somehow feel complete.
Maybe that’s the truth hiding in all of this: we don’t lose track of time when we’re absorbed — we finally meet it.
ETA – 1 h 38 m | Cruise — Inception and Depth
Speaking of films — one always stays with me: Inception. In Nolan’s story, time stretches the deeper the characters descend into each dream layer. Ten seconds above become an hour below.
Maybe that wasn’t about dreams. Maybe it was about awareness.
I stare out the window. The horizon is a thin burnished line, clouds stacked like slow rivers. From here you can see how depth changes everything — even time.
Half an hour disappears without me noticing. Cheese and crackers now, a small glass of red catching the light. Time quietly doing its work while I think about it.
At the surface of life, everything moves fast — scroll, reply, refresh. But when we descend — into presence — time changes shape. A moment becomes something you can stand inside.
That’s what Inception captured: the layers of living. The surface where we function; the deeper layers where we feel. Time doesn’t lengthen there — it deepens.
Maybe the task isn’t to find more hours in the day, but to live in the ones we already have — to go one layer down.
ETA – 1 h 12 m | Cruise — When Time Bends
The red is good — smooth, quiet company as the cabin darkens to that deep-blue hour between day and night. The light has softened, the chatter faded. Somewhere below, the world keeps turning at its usual pace, but up here the seconds feel slower, stretched thin across the sky.
I think about the people beneath — lights flicking on in small towns, dinners cooking, phones glowing. There’s comfort in seeing it from above. Life keeps moving, but not rushing. Every person bound in their own clock.
It feels ancient, this perspective — as if every generation that’s ever looked down from a hilltop, a mast, or a cockpit has known the same calm. From above, the noise shrinks and clarity returns.
It reminds me of flow — that state when challenge and skill meet perfectly and the mind becomes weightless. Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi described it as complete absorption, when the part of the brain that tracks time and self simply falls silent.¹
That’s why simulators, movies, even moments like this can feel timeless. The mind stops measuring and starts being.
Csíkszentmihályi wrote:
“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times … but the ones when we are fully engaged.”¹
Neuroscientist David Eagleman found that our brains compress repetition but stretch novelty.² Childhood felt long because everything was new; adulthood feels fast because we stop noticing. The more detail we see, the more life expands.
I’ve always loved ancient history — the study of time gone by. I think about the philosophers and builders who lived their entire lives by the arc of the sun, never in a hurry, yet leaving things that have lasted thousands of years. Maybe that’s what I admire most — how they managed to slow time not by holding it still, but by filling it with meaning.
I glance at my wrist — a digital face glowing quietly. I started the stopwatch at pushback; I always do when I’m paxing. A small reflex. I can’t see the instruments, but I’d guess we’re at Mach .78. Funny how pilots are back-seat drivers, even here.
The flight hasn’t changed pace at all — yet time inside this cabin feels different.
Maybe it isn’t time that bends, but perception that deepens — and the deeper it goes, the freer it feels.
ETA – 0 h 46 m | Cruise — The Fuel Analogy
The cabin lights have dimmed to a late-evening glow. It’s dark outside now — hard to see the stars from three seats away from the window, masked a bit by the reflection of the interior lighting. The cabin has taken on that soft purple hue this airline is known for — calm, almost meditative. The air feels smoother, as if the flight has settled into its natural rhythm.
It strikes me that time is a lot like fuel. Not because it’s scarce, but because it responds to how we use it. Altitude, weight, speed, route — every choice affects the flow. We can stretch endurance with care, or move faster when conditions call for it. Sometimes efficiency isn’t about saving — it’s about using what we have with purpose.
A wise captain once told me that flying is just time in motion — the art of managing energy, altitude, and awareness so that every moment has direction.
There are times, of course, when we need to burn extra fuel. When landing close to maximum landing weight, we descend early, speed up, use what we must. I had to do exactly that on a recent check ride — with the examiner watching, naturally. I’d predicted we’d land a little heavy, so I adjusted the fuel in the tanks — that thing that provides or takes away time — to touch down just under maximum landing weight. Another paradox: too much of the very thing you’re meant to manage.
Fuel — this chemical store of energy and motion — is what gives us time in the first place. And sometimes the best use of it is to let it go.
That’s interesting… maybe it’s also ok to let go of time. Maybe we all have enough, and if it’s used wisely, it’s ok to release it sometimes — to stop gripping so tightly. Time, after all, keeps moving whether we hold it or not.
The ancient thinkers understood this long before aircraft or clocks — they saw that life moves at its own pace, and peace comes not from controlling time, but from moving well within it. It reminds me of the image of the puppy and the cart — the one I wrote about recently. The cart keeps rolling either way, but the puppy that walks willingly moves with less strain. Maybe time’s like that too.
Only now do I notice the soundtrack playing softly through my headphones — Inception, by Hans Zimmer. My favourite composer. I studied classical composition at university, and I still love how a good score carries a story — how it moves, builds, releases, and resolves. Music, like flight, is time made visible.
I glance at the stopwatch on my wrist — two and a half hours gone since pushback. The flight feels shorter than that, yet fuller somehow. Maybe that’s what good use of time looks like — efficient burn, steady flow, nothing left idling.
I think of how often we treat time like something to be stored up or spent carefully, when maybe the point is to use it cleanly, deliberately, without resistance. A well-flown day (or night!) doesn’t feel rushed or long — it just feels complete.
Maybe the trolleys are all locked away now — that quiet signal the flight’s drawing toward its end.
ETA – 0 h 21 m | Top of Descent
The chime sounds and the captain’s voice threads through the cabin — descent about to begin. I pause the music and take out an earbud, just to hear the change in tone. There’s always that subtle shift in energy when a flight begins to descend — a quiet focus, a collective awareness that the journey is nearly done.
I glance at the digital face on my wrist. Three hours and twenty-six minutes. The same digits glowing on a little screen I’ve been checking all night. It’s funny how even when I’m not flying, I still keep time — as if I’m afraid to let it slip past unnoticed.
The cabin glows in soft purples and golds, reflections rippling in the window panels. Outside, I can’t see the stars — only the faint shimmer of city lights below, scattered like embers across the darkness. Each one a little story still unfolding, unaware of this aircraft passing far above.
It occurs to me that the longest I’ve ever been without a way to count time was years ago, on an Outward Bound course in the Marlborough Sounds. Three days alone on a small stretch of shoreline — no watch, no phone, no clock. Just food, shelter, and the rhythm of the sun. The tide came and went, boats passed in the distance, and I guessed the hours by light and hunger. It was strange at first, then freeing. Without time to measure, life didn’t feel slower or faster — just full.
Interesting that this memory surfaces now, at top of descent, as if my mind’s reminding me that time isn’t something I’ve ever needed to control — only to notice.
I can’t close the laptop just yet — not until the article’s done. A few more lines, a few more thoughts to land. Then it’ll be time to put it all away.
There it is again — time.
Well… time’s up.
Or maybe it isn’t.
Maybe it just hands us gently to the next moment — same rate, same sky, still moving.
As the nose dips and the lights of the city draw closer, I think of how time once felt endless — those long afternoons of childhood that seemed to stretch forever in the warm, late Canterbury sun. Now, the same hours pass in a breath. Perhaps it isn’t the world that’s changed pace, but our awareness that’s narrowed.
Children live inside their moments; adults count them. Do you remember how proud you were when you were first taught to tell the time? I do — I loved it. I had a cardboard clock to practice on. And right there, we learned not just to read the hours, but to start counting them.
Maybe that’s when we began to lose the knack of walking beside time, and started trying to keep up with it.
Maybe that’s all it takes to slow time again — to let go of controlling it, to walk beside it instead. Like the movie, like the simulator — just be, travel with a smile, and recognise that life is at its very best when we do.
Maybe it’s less about time management — and more about time companionship.
References
- Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990).
- David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (2011); “Human time perception and its illusions,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9(12), 940–950 (2008).
Author’s Note
It wasn’t until just after top of descent that I realised what this piece was really about.
It’s for my Aunty, who has just passed — a woman who lived to a great old age, charting her own path in a country far from where she was born. A life of struggle and quiet resilience, full of stories and light. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been thinking about time — how to co-habitate with it wisely, not just to use it well, but to walk beside it.
Haere atu rā, moe mai rā i te rangimārie.
Go forth, rest now in peace.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on time. Send me an email — tell me how it feels in your world.
— Mark
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