There's something about beautiful moments in sports that alters our experience of time. And I'd say the same thing about poetry and gardening. Gardening slows me down. I want to stop and observe everything.

Presence makes time feel infinite

There's a weird paradox in modern life: we're constantly rushing to save time, yet we feel like we never have enough of it. Ross Gay points to something that actually fixes this—not by giving us more hours, but by changing how we experience them. A perfect play in a game, a line of poetry that lands just right, or the slow work of tending plants all do something similar: they make time feel different, thicker, more real.

The gardening example is particularly telling because it's so unglamorous. You're not achieving anything in the traditional sense—no score, no finish line. Yet something in the act of noticing, of waiting for growth you can't rush, genuinely recalibrates you. This matters because we're not actually time-starved in the way we think. We're attention-starved. Most of our day is half-lived, eyes on our phones, minds already three steps ahead. When you're fully present in something—whether that's watching a game unfold or watching soil and seeds—time stops feeling like an enemy and starts feeling like the only place worth being.