Clocks that disagree

119 days till I write JEE. 526 days since I stepped into a new school. 22 days since I published my debut book. I’ve been thinking a lot about these numbers lately. They feel important. But more than anything, they remind me of how time moves. Or rather, how it runs.

The other day, I walked into a small shop that fixes watches and clocks to run an errand. It was a tiny corner store whose walls were covered with clocks. Wall clocks, desk clocks, antique clocks, digital clocks. Every surface was covered in time, or so it seemed. And yet, not a single clock showed the same hour. Some were fast, others slow, a few frozen entirely. All of them disagreed.

Standing there, surrounded by the soft ticking and humming, I was oddly fascinated. Time is always running, but where to? That thought wouldn’t leave me. We treat time like a universal truth, something absolute. But clearly, even clocks can't agree on where we are.

The longer I stood there taking pictures of the pretty clocks, the more it struck me that time behaves more like a person than a machine. Some days, time just zooms by like a kid who’s too excited to wait. Other days, it drags like someone who’s tired and needs a break. And sometimes, it feels like time just pauses, waiting for us to catch up.

We like to think we’re all moving on the same timeline, but we’re not. One person’s “right time” might be someone else’s delay. Some people grow fast, others bloom later. One person can live a lifetime in a year; another can stay stuck in the same chapter for five. Is this what rhythm is? Is life supposed to be a single standard clock?

Numbers like 119, 526, or 22 might mark time, but they don’t explain it. Not really. They don’t capture the way anticipation can stretch minutes into hours. Or how joy can make an entire day disappear. Numbers don’t show how change creeps in silently, without a timestamp.

Are clocks that disagree broken? Maybe, but for me they’re just honest, and are a reflection of how time really feels to us. Subjective.

Time is always running, with us, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, sometimes completely out of sync and that’s okay. Maybe we’re not meant to control it or catch up to it and just meant to walk with it, at our own pace

When I reflect on those numbers, 119 days ahead, 526 days past, 22 days into a new chapter, they cease to feel like mere deadlines or metrics. Instead, they serve as subtle reminders that I am, have been and will continue to progress. For me, the truest measure of time is found in clocks that disagree.

I can't help but wonder if time feels different for everyone, whose time are you living by?