The hour nobody owns

A man in a hospital waiting area in Amman checks the clock on the wall for the fourth time and says, to nobody in particular, that he is wasting his whole day.

It is the most natural sentence in the world. I am not sure it is true.

We talk about time as if it were savings in a drawer. Something we hold, something we can lose through carelessness, something a slow queue can take from us. That picture makes every delay feel like theft.

But time does not sit anywhere waiting to be spent well or badly. There is no store of it that runs low when the wait is long. It is simply the measure we lay across everything else: the conversation, the worry, the book left in the car, the stranger on the next chair. The hours are not a resource standing beside our lives. They are the shape our lives take as they happen.

Seen that way, the afternoon in the waiting area is not lost. It is the afternoon. It is being lived either way, in irritation or in attention, in counting the minutes or in noticing who else is counting them.

What we can waste is not the hour. It is our part in it, the choice of what we bring to it while it passes.

The clock on the wall is not keeping anything for us. It only tells us how much of today has already arrived.