Years ago, although I remember it like it was yesterday, (how’s that for time?) We drove past a church billboard that made us stop and do a full double-take. It said, “If you kill time, you murder success.” My partner was immediately outraged and sputtering mad. It’s become one of those phrases we can bring up whenever we want to rile him up or provide a pattern interrupt, because it’s such a perfect encapsulation of the version of time that so many of us have inherited.
This is our TikTok time. It’s linear time. It’s calendar time. It’s productivity time. It’s the idea that the clock is a moral authority, or that every unused moment is a crime against our future, or that rest is suspicious. It’s even the idea that success is always being murdered by our failure to optimize.
That billboard was Saturn in one of its most distorted forms: Kronos, the limiter, the punisher, the devourer. Time as something that eats you if you do not outrun it. This is Time as the stern authority standing over your life, measuring whether you have been useful.
This is not the only way to understand Saturn, and it’s definitely not the only way to be in a relationship with Time. Most of us were taught that Time is something to manage:
- We save time.
- We spend time.
- We waste time.
- We run out of time.
- We’re trying to catch up.
- We have deadlines
We all carry beliefs, rules, and wounds around Time. Relationships don’t always deepen during a productivity sprint, and spiritual practices can’t be rushed into maturity just because the calendar or our expectations say they have to be done now.