How Short a Year Can Be, While Having Long Days
The year felt both endless and fleeting. Between the quiet of my cellphone, the pain of searching for work, and the slow farewell to my mother, time became a strange companion.
Philosophy
How Short a Year Can Be, While Having Long Days
By MoAfrika Skotch Ntilane — 20 November 2025
Time is a peculiar thing. I have felt it stretch, pull, and collapse all within a single year. There is a paradox in living a year that feels impossibly short, yet contains days that unfold like centuries. I remember this most vividly in the months leading up to my mother’s passing, when the clock seemed to slow its tick only to hurl me forward without warning.
Conversations at the Edge of Silence
Her voice, frail yet unyielding, carried lessons I did not fully appreciate at the time. We spoke often in the quiet spaces of her room: mornings with sunlight spilling over the hospital sheets, evenings when the dim light of the lamp softened her face and her fears. I listened more than I spoke.
“Mo,” she would say, “you plan too much. Life doesn’t care for your Excel columns.” In her laughter was both admonishment and affection, a reminder that my life, measured in tasks and outcomes, was never the whole story.
Measuring Life Beyond Hours
In retrospect, the year felt impossibly short and interminably long all at once. Weeks raced past when life was moving in momentum, yet individual days stretched under the weight of waiting, uncertainty, and sorrow. I found that true measurement of life is not in hours, but in human presence, in love exchanged, in patience with oneself, in the quiet courage to face each day with clarity and integrity.
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