MOTION: ON TIME, TRUST, AND LETTING LIFE MOVE

 

Time is strange.

When you imagine it ahead of you, it feels abundant, stretching endlessly into the future. You think you have time. But once you arrive there, it slips through your fingers, leaving you wondering how it all passed so quickly. Suddenly, there’s “no time.”

No one really talks about how much thinking ahead reshapes our relationship with time, especially as creatives. Planning content, scheduling posts, and imagining projects not yet created means your mind is constantly living in the future. You’re always ahead of yourself.

As children, time feels slow and generous. A year feels like forever. As adults, years collapse into moments. Perhaps it’s because we’ve trained ourselves to perceive time differently. We’ve grown used to its movement. We’ve normalized its speed.

Time has no pause button.

It moves forward whether we plan perfectly, make mistakes, or do absolutely nothing. We don’t control it.

And realizing that, that surrender has quietly led me back to trust.

Last year, my word was Providence. Through it, I learned that there is no formula for life. No guaranteed blueprint for success. What works for someone else will not necessarily work for me. Accepting God’s will means releasing the illusion of control and learning to trust the unfolding.

And so, life has taught me to move differently.

I’ve noticed that I don’t plan creativity the way I used to. I no longer sit down and force ideas for the next artwork or project. Inspiration arrives as I live. The world teaches me. Lessons reveal themselves. Creativity wakes up naturally, one moment at a time.

Our creations are not empty; they are given meaning. And that meaning is shaped by how we perceive them. We choose our interpretations, consciously or unconsciously, and in doing so, we bring the work to life. When we force interactions or try to rigidly place our thoughts onto a piece, we often interrupt its natural becoming. But when we allow space, the work breathes. It meets us halfway. As creators, we don’t just make, we translate, giving form to what we sense, feel, and notice as we move through life.

That realization has softened me.

It has made me less uptight, less anxious about planning weeks ahead, and less stressed over things that don’t yet exist. Letting life unfold has allowed creativity and provision to arrive without resistance.

I keep moving, trusting that I will not lack. Trusting that the next client will come, even when I don’t know where from. Trusting that abundance flows, not because I chase it desperately, but because I remain prepared to receive it.

Preparedness and trust are not opposites.
They move together.

Time continues to move. It waits for no one. And while science tells us time may be linear or perhaps even exist all at once, with past and future intertwined, only God sees the full picture. We don’t. The futures we rehearse in our minds often become sources of unnecessary worry, shaped more by fear than faith.

So this year, I choose something different.

I let it move.
I expect the best.
I trust that God has my back.
I believe that all things work together for my good.

And my image of time has changed, too.

People often represent time as an hourglass, something you flip over and start again. Rinse. Repeat.

But for me, time feels more like ice.

Ice melts. It doesn’t reset. It transforms into water, into motion, into energy. You don’t get it back in its original form. It becomes something else. The past survives only as memory: a frozen image, a photograph, a piece of art we revisit and relive. The future, on the other hand, exists only in perception, constructed in our minds, planned but not yet lived. And so, time continues. The present is the only thing that is truly accurate. Knowing this, I let time move as it will. I let it flow naturally because time isn’t something I can manipulate, even if I wanted to. We don’t control.

And maybe that’s the lesson.

Not just to flow, but to move.

That is why I chose Motion as my word for the year. As time moves, and as I remain in motion, so does the depth of my work, my continuity, my perception of time, and my lived reality. I cannot pause time, I can only adapt to its movement and continue creating, knowing that transformation is inevitable and that with time, things become better.