How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?
For a long time, I believed life moved in straight lines: effort leads to achievement, achievement leads to clarity, and clarity leads to peace. I thought of time as a neutral backdrop—something that simply passed while I did the real work of becoming. However, significant life events have complicated that view. They’ve shown me that time is not passive at all. It presses, reshapes, interrupts, and sometimes won’t explain itself until much later.
Some of the most impactful moments in my life didn’t seem ‘significant’ at first. Leaving home, for example, felt more like momentum than a rupture. Studying abroad, navigating top academic environments, earning awards and credentials—these were seen as progress, and in many ways they were. But over time, I’ve realized what those moments also included: quiet dislocations, constantly needing to translate myself, and the understanding that success can exist alongside a persistent feeling of not belonging.
Time reveals the emotional aftermath of events we once hurried through. What initially felt like resilience sometimes becomes relentless endurance. What seemed like confidence can later be seen as mere performance. In academic halls where I learned to speak fluently in theory and critique, I also realized how easy it is to mistake recognition for wholeness. It took years—and distance—to see that clearly.
Time has also softened my relationship with certainty. Earlier in life, I held strong views on identity, culture, and morality, often influenced by my background and teachings. Encounters with difference—especially in places where norms around relationships, sexuality, and self-expression sharply diverged from mine—initially felt destabilizing. I wanted clear categories, right and wrong answers. But over time, and through lived experience, I’ve developed a more generous outlook. I no longer feel the need to resolve every contradiction right away. Some things must be lived with before they can be understood.
Significant life events have also taught me that growth is rarely sudden. It is cumulative. It occurs in conversations that linger, in moments of laughter that unexpectedly disarm a room, and in invitations that compel you to confront your assumptions about intention and meaning. These moments don’t always transform your life overnight, but they subtly reshape how you navigate it. Over time, they accumulate.
There is also grief in the passage of time—grief for versions of myself that believed effort alone could outrun history or that achievement could shield someone from vulnerability. Engaging deeply with questions of colonialism, representation, and power has made it impossible to see my personal journey as separate from larger structures. Time has heightened my awareness that individual success does not erase collective wounds, and that progress without reflection can reproduce the very hierarchies it claims to transcend.
Yet, time has not made me cynical. If anything, it has made me more attentive. I now see that perspective is something earned slowly, often through discomfort. Major life events—failures as well as achievements, misunderstandings as well as clarity—have taught me to listen more intently, speak more carefully, and hold my ambitions alongside a sense of responsibility to context and community.
Maybe the most important shift is this: I no longer see life as something to conquer or finish. Time has changed how I view it as something to practice. Each phase offers a different perspective, not because the past was wrong, but because it was incomplete. I’ve learned that perspective isn’t about having the final answer; it’s about being open to revising the question.
In that sense, the passage of time is not a thief—it is a partner. It takes away illusions, yes, but it also brings back depth. And in that depth, I am learning to live with more honesty, humility, and care than I ever thought possible.
