“No Time” Doesn’t Exist

We say “I don’t have time” for the things we haven’t yet decided matter. It’s never really about the clock.

A busy king came to visit the teacher one day, full of the affairs of running a kingdom. And the teacher asked him a vivid question. Imagine, he said, a messenger rushed in from the east and reported: Your Majesty, a vast mountain, high as the clouds, is rolling toward us, crushing every living thing in its path. Then a second messenger from the west, same report. Then north, then south — four enormous mountains, closing in from every direction, grinding everything to dust. With all of that bearing down on you, and human life so rare and precious, what on earth would you do?

And the king, who a moment ago had no time for anything but governing, answered without hesitation: what could I possibly do, except live well and do good with whatever time is left? Nothing else would matter. The armies, the wealth, the schemes — useless against a mountain. Only how I lived would mean anything.

Then the teacher closed the trap, gently. Those mountains, he said, are real. They’re called aging and death, and they are rolling toward every one of us, from every direction, grinding down each day whether we attend to them or not. So — what should you do?

Suddenly the man with “no time” had all the time in the world for the only thing that mattered.

Here’s the quiet truth underneath. Everyone gets the same twenty-four hours. When we say “I don’t have time” for something, what we almost always mean is “I haven’t yet decided this matters enough.” We have time for what we’ve ranked as urgent. “No time” isn’t a fact about the clock — it’s a confession about our priorities.

Which is oddly liberating, because priorities can be re-ranked, today, for free. You don’t need to find time for stillness or goodness or the people you love. The time is already there. You only need to decide they belong near the top — before the mountains finish their slow roll in.

Take a breath. There's no rush to the next page.

Where this comes from

From “‘No Time’ Doesn’t Exist in the World,” based on the Pabbatopama Sutta (the four mountains and King Pasenadi).