I didn’t plan for this conversation.

The level of transparency someone felt free to express caught me off guard.

At my work, we recently had an employee appreciation event. It was a good time and I’m grateful God has brought me to the place I spend my working hours each week. As I sat there, beneath the outdoor tent with a few colleagues, I just observed the scene. Some were dancing with the DJ. Many were enjoying conversations. It was pleasant. I thought to myself there was almost a church-like environment present, though the tightest bonds are missing, except from among those who are believers.

My large scale social battery empties a lot faster than it used to, and I made an Irish exit.

As I walked back to my car, I came to an intersection and ran into a colleague who I had met during a leadership class and only had a couple follow up conversations with

I didn’t know at the time of my Irish exit that I would be walking into confession where he would tell me about experiencing, in his words, the most evil feeling in the world.

Time has been on my mind a lot this year.

How much time we do or don’t have, what we value and spend our time on, or even the concept of time being ours to spend. It’s not like you can save it. How do we steward the time we’ve been given? They are moments that pass through our hands which will never come back.

Contemplating the effects of my career in the automotive industry is what kicked off my contemplation of time. I can gauge time like nobody’s business, and that only goes awry when I have to consider somebody else whose time sense hasn’t been shaped like mine. Which is pretty much daily. For years my paycheck depended on me being able to gauge time effectively. I wasn’t in the military so I don’t know how those particular forces twist time, but my colleague was. He expressed how he knew what it was like to wake up at O’dark-thirty and do more work before the sun comes up than most people do in an entire day.

I don’t know if it was out of excessive levels of feeling safety or overwhelm, or something else, but he just started externally processing with me. Literally, I said “Hi,” to him as I walked to my car. He returned the greeting, and greeted again in a more familiar way once he recognized me. It was a skip all small talk type of interaction. Bits and pieces of his story began to fall all around us as we stood at that parking lot crossroads. I listened and tried to connect the dots. This wasn’t a linear track he was taking me down. “You just finished your masters degree?” I asked him. “Yup.” Spot on. Listening still active.

He went on to tell me how he spent the last two years working toward this achievement. He had one final paper to turn in, but even if he absolutely bombed it, he would still pass the class and gain his degree. When I started making sense of the journey he was telling me about, I thought he meant it was a relief to be done. That was a misunderstanding.

To summarize… “For two years, I said no to things. I put off my personal projects. I denied myself and turned things down and set it all aside for later because I had class work to do. Now that I’m done, I have the time to take those projects on. My home is empty and I felt like I should be doing something. I couldn’t do my projects because I felt like I had papers to write even though they were all done. There was the nagging feeling I should’ve been doing something else, and that felt like the most evil feeling in the world.”

It’s not like he regretted his decision to further his education. I don’t think he felt remorse over a perception of squandered time. I wouldn’t even describe it as him trying to fill a hole in his life. Rather, it was as if the effect of his time commitment left a scar on him that he didn’t anticipate. One he couldn’t have accounted for. Directed intentional time asked something of him and refused to let go.

A restlessness had caught up with him.

His decision to pursue a higher education isn’t even what’s on the scale here. I’m not even making a judgment on his experience. How time shifts and is skewed, elevated, demoted in an individual is a story only they truly know the depths of. I don’t know how it affects you. I can’t empathize with how it affected this colleague. I know what it was like as an automotive technician, and that certainly creates a common bond with other techs for me. We recognize that we’re looking in a mirror, but that doesn’t stop it from reflecting fun house level distortions of how time actually works, along with the struggle to see clearly.

What actually is time? It’s relative. We don’t all experience a day in the same way. Eight hours at work can fly by or it can drag. Someone once said the days are slow and the years fly by. There are links to our memory and experiences when we don’t experience anything new or something becomes the same old thing day after day. It’s difficult to remember what happened to us and how we got this way. Is the day only relative to the rotation of the Earth? A day on Jupiter looks a whole lot different than the 24 hours we experience on our perfectly balanced flying space rock.

One thing we can be sure of is that our lives are short and the days are evil (Ephesians 5:15-18). The world seems to never tire of new ways to resurrect old horrors. It’s not as if the gods ever lost their voracious appetite, seeking whom they may devour (1 Peter 5:8)

As we understand it, time does give us a structure to operate within. We know what o’clock to meet someone. The calendar lets us coordinate on what day it is. The seasons come and go in a rhythm. We can learn and understand time is a phenomenon that is fixed yet somehow fluid under distortion.

Time is relative to an automotive technician, in a military man, and a homeschool mom who is trying to take care of four children, and everyone who wants to get home for the holidays, but isn’t all of that how we perceive time?

What was time to an entire crew of a Nantucket whale ship as they sailed the seas to bring back whale oil for lamp light? Was it anything more than day and night, the passing of seasons and the difference in height of their children from when they left to when they returned?

At the end of the day, time affects us all. We don’t own any of it. I’m not even sure we can steward it. Perhaps it’s just something that we pass through.

Outside of it all is the omniscient, omnipresent God of the universe to whom 1000 years is like a day or a day is like 1000 years (2 Peter 3:9). At first blush, it could be easy to say that that’s a mystery, but if I do really step out of the rush of time and experience and perception of the evil days of life, it might make a little more sense.

One day we’re going to look in the mirror and it’s a very real possibility we won’t recognize who’s staring back at us.

Influence comes at us in every direction, far more than just in time. Pressures confine us and figuring out how to keep moving can be a matter of fight or flight.

Many things shape us. Time is one of them.

We don’t know if this will be the last time we see our spouses or kids when we leave. It’s possible the final moment we leave them with is the silent mutiny of anger and resentment. If we aren’t numbering our days, the temptation will hang in front of us that we don’t have to pull back our quiet contempt because there’s always tomorrow to try again.

We can afford to be lazy today because tomorrow is right around the corner. Someday we’ll get to those projects. Someday we’ll take the trip. Someday we’ll have that conversation or write the book or work on that degree or finally start taking care of ourselves.

Carpe diem. It’s time to seize the day, yet, once we’ve seized it… there is still the restlessness that won’t let us go.

What do you think the solution is? Hit reply and share your thoughts. I’d love to keep working this out together with more than one voice. We don’t all have this figured out. My thought is the solution could be to hold things with an open palm. Let me know what you think.

When I spoke about The Long Way Around in April 2026, a guy I used to work with came and reconnected with me. After he left, he later sent me this text. I’m providing it unedited with his permission.

Ya man I miss our conversations we’d get into at work. When I saw your post about the speech today I was riding down the road with the wife and I said I got to go to this but I was hesitant because I hate having to leave work and it was the very thing you titled your speech learning to slow down that I made myself leave work. It was very eye opening because I’ve not been able to describe it to other people how I feel like my life is in flat rate mode and I honestly thought I was alone not being able to cut it off. I’ve joked around for years about how I feel uncomfortable when I go on vacation and ultimately have cut them short and until today I couldn’t really put it into words as to why and it’s me taking the clock home and not shutting it off. Ehh didn’t mean to get off on a tangent but thank you very much I look forward to reading your book when it comes out on paper back

This is an observational post. I’m asking you to stand on the edge of the dock and look out into the blackness.

It’s funny. I had this post written out, and then we attended our homeschool graduation ceremony. The speaker gave a charge to the students and the verse used in his message was Psalms‬ ‭90‬:‭12‬ . Our days are not forever.

I don’t know where I saw it this week, and if I did I’d properly cite it… but..

This whole reflection on time has been resonating with more readers. I’m going to be considering if this may be the next leg of my writing journey. Or maybe it’ll be one in parallel to Fightin’ Poseidon. Not sure yet. I have several topics that still need to be written and published here. Whichever way is the route forward, ears are perking up and hands are raising.

Unknown waters await.

Stay Anchored and keep fighting the good fight,

~ J.P. Simons ⚓️

PS: If you haven’t already ordered it, please check out my first book, Pray Then Plow: Practical Steps For Men Who Won’t Give Up. It’s now available in paperback.

Nothing too long today.

Just a recommendation.

A book that helped me put some of this chaos back into order is Death by Living, by N.D. Wilson.

It’s wonderful, poetic, and will be of great help in embracing your second life.

Below is his trailer for the book to give you a taste of what’s in its pages. You can tap the title of the book above to go to the website.