By Janeen McCrae in Newsletter — 09 Apr 2025

The time it takes is the time it takes

Why do we always look for shortcuts?

Knowledge takes time.

It takes time to listen and connect and study and graduate. To repeat and write and erase and improve. To apply and submit and hold up a finger to poke at the breeze with ambient curiosity.

In our pursuit of it, we fail and recover and readjust the parameters of our experimental dabblings, flipping pages, clicking buttons, and listening to the age of it pour from the mouths of our mentors. With reverent attention, we learn. We learn and we get smarter.

But it takes time.

Absorption and understanding moves both fast and slow. As a bullet train. As a glacier. In this, there is no accurate prediction of time, only timeframes of occurrence. Maybe here. Maybe there. A shrug of our ancestral shoulders chalks crudely at the wall.

It takes time—its own sweet time—to test and connect the flailing neurons to the anchor of our experience. Lessons of life, love, and reality endure the sentence, and no efficiency system, shortcut, or cheat code can fake it. You know or you don’t. Ignorance wears a mask that can never quite cover its identifying features.

Wisdom?

Give it time.

Evolution takes time.

It takes time and pours a healthy dose of DNA, circumstance, twigs, and space dust into the crucible of itself. From there, it molds and tweaks and adjusts and deletes whole verses to write and edit the song of life. Want this. Don’t need that. Amplify and de-emphasize.

What if we…?

Where can we…?

It manipulates genes and strands and fast tracks the influence of patterns and shapes and climate and environment. Mutations occur. Delete. Anomalies and misprints and noses on elbows and oh wow. Reprint.

But it takes time.

We meddle and fiddle and thigh master and infomercial our way through this pit to find our place. Instrumental. No fast tracks without side effects. No clear cuts without dead trees. We want to lose weight yesterday and fix our faces and keep our hair and become enhanced super beings but can we please, for the love of God, skip the hard parts.

Our minds orchestrate wild compositions in the vacuum. Adagio! Allegro. Lento. Presto! A wild ride, we wince as a new cacophony of dysmorphias are played to our audience.

Tap the baton against the conductor’s podium.

Change.

Give it time, maestro.

Love takes time.

It takes time and messes with it like some college dropout doctor mixing medicines in Cupid’s basement. Look ma, no gloves!

Chemical, guttural, primal. It can take time and distort it in cruel and unusual ways. It can be warp-fast then treacle-slow. It can be subtle and knowable then unknowable and mean.

Love. Appearing suddenly to drag across our future a massive trench to be leapt across or to fall into, over, and over again.

And we fall into it fast enough, sure. We rush headlong into the vision of what we think it is with nary a second thought. No time for it. In our eagerness to find it and try it on we wound each other and scratch and ding our side panels and hit and run and get stuck in ditches awaiting a rescue that may never come.

Oh, well.

Hopeful, always hopeful, but impatient with it. Our hearts open and close as freely as dog doors.

We slip and fall and settle and search for.

Self.

Give it time.

Acceptance takes time.

It takes time and hacks at the fringes of it with a dumb rock. Our hearts are left exposed to the elements because of it. We appear fractured and broken, yearning openly for our pain to evaporate, for situations to change, and for the missing to re-materialize at the kitchen table or in our beds. For the us of yesterday to be the we of today.

The absence at our edges is overwhelming.

It takes time to wear it down to a shape we can tolerate. To accept the monolithic memory at the periphery of our vision as something we visit rather than live beneath the shadow of.

The wind of acceptance whips, the water drips and carves this dreadful feeling into cliffs and canyons and towers and mesas. Each grain of sand lost is not a tragedy but a vista point to our resilience.

Grief.

Give it time.

Life takes time.

It takes time and ignores our impatience and laughs at our pathetic attempts to both stretch it in the body while condensing it in the moment.

Work? Make it go faster. Multitasking. AI-ing. Robot-ing. Traffic? Get out of my way. Honk. Rage. Rampage. Age? Stop it! Artificial shortcuts and squeezing and condensing the tasks of life while prolonging the physicality of it.

Until….

At some point comes the realization—the tipping point of time.

You can use your shortcuts and apply all your cheats and hacks but at some point, the truth will reveal itself to you: The time it takes is the time it takes.

Our lack of control over time is infuriating. Slowed down. Stuck in life’s traffic. Stopped at a light. Waiting at sign. Diverted by a detour. In these moments we fret and rage and shake fists and feel our collective temperatures rise. But why?

Why must everything be now?

We learn nothing in the rush hour of our rush.

Everything takes time. Work. Love. Art. Conversation. Travel. Acceptance. Empathy. Recovery. Life.

Everything.

Everything takes time. But only you can give it.

Give yourself time.

Time to breathe. Time to think. Time to adjust your thinking about time.

So, this is how it will go.

You will sit in the traffic. You will wait for the light to change. The cars will move. And then you will be on your way.

Breathe. Repeat this in your moment of panic:

“The time it takes is the time it takes.”

Just give it time.

This week’s amends…

"He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch."

– Jean-Luc Godard

Via Nitch

On Rotation: “Digital Gravestone” by Deradoorian

A reminder that all songs featured in this newsletter over the years are added to the giant mega super playlist of magnificents and magnificence which you can access with an effortless depress of this button. 👇

The Stream On Rotation Playlist