When Time Changed Shape

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It began with someone else’s unease. My rooh ki saheli (soul friend) had messaged earlier that morning. She was leaving for her six-hour-away destination in interior Sindh and wrote about her travel anxiety. The restlessness before departure, the ache of transition itself. I thought about it as I packed. Why am I not anxious anymore? I, who once turned every journey into mild existential drama. That question stayed with me as we left Fujairah. 

I sat in the passenger seat while my three travel companions chatted in the back. AirPods in, I drifted into my own world. HAEVN’s The Sea filled it: songs that float between melancholy and surrender. “Back in the water, I feel like myself again,” the lyrics said. A chaddi buddy, childhood friend I’d recently rediscovered, had introduced me to the playlist. It felt like a small dedication, a familiar tide returning after years apart. 

The road wound along the coast, sea glinting on one side, barren hills of Sharjah on the other blurred into muted tones, the color of time drabbish. Yet scattered shrubs and planted palms tinted the landscape, showing that arid time can hold color. Yes, even time can have a colorful dimension.

Another dost (friend) texted midway. She sent me a picture of the first page of a book she was reading.

The page began with Whitman:

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Below it was a line from a Muslim scholar who had once said, “We are Muslim wine-drinkers.”

I smiled. Across centuries and faiths, both seemed to be saying the same thing, that contradiction is not confusion but completeness. Somewhere between the sea and the city, I thought of The Life of Chuck. The film ends with that very Whitman line, a reminder that a life is never one thing or one story. Each journey folds in on itself, a beginning hiding inside an ending, an ending quietly becoming a beginning again.

It struck me then that what was shifting wasn’t the journey, but time itself. Not faster or slower - just different. Layered. Contradictory in the way Whitman meant it. Waiting was no longer an interruption between departures and arrivals; it was part of the same fabric. Time wasn’t something to be endured or managed. It was something I was already inside.

Abu Dhabi arrived in its usual measured rhythm. I have traveled too much lately. Lahore, Lagos, Nairobi, Geneva, Dubai, New York, Chicago, Madison, Karachi - all blending into each other. Somewhere along the way, I had stopped resisting movement. Travel anxiety had given up on me. I’ve only missed flights from tardiness, not tension, albeit in my angst-ridden dreams. Still, I notice the ways waiting changes shape. O’Hare or JFK feels different from an Amtrak stop at Union Station or Penn Station; Grand Central is quite different from a Greyhound or Coach USA stop. Time in the travel vessel or carrier is also different, space and color wise, from time in the waiting area or lounge.

That night, the real journey began. The concert. Sami Yusuf and Atif Aslam. The auditorium lights dimmed, oud smoke curled through the air, and the first notes rose like prayer. Sami’s voice carried a stillness that felt ancient. The music folded me inward until thought stopped. It felt serendipitous. I hadn’t known Sami before. His symphony, rich with Central Asian and North African instruments, wove through the hall like breath itself. It brought tears to my eyes - rare for someone who doesn’t cry easily. When he sang a Sufi composition, I felt something dissolve. It wasn’t sadness or awe. Just completeness. For a fleeting second, it felt like I could die right then and it would still be the right time, space, and sound. A moment that could hold both life and its ending without conflict. Dying before death, as the mystics say.

Then came the merger. Sami and Atif together, chanting Rumi in Persian. I touched the Heech ring and pendant I’d worn for the concert, its hollow shape reminding me that nothingness is everythingness. The Persian verses flowed seamlessly into Nusrat’s Dam Mast Qalandar, and the hall erupted into collective ecstasy. It was divine, but also strangely human. The sea again, taking and returning everything.

I thought of my saheli, already far away, having reached her destination. The chaddi buddy whose playlist had set this tide in motion. Of the dost who’d shared Whitman. Of the barren hills. The music had threaded it all together - faith and frailty, motion and stillness, love and loss.

After the concert, I texted my saheli. She said she still felt uneasy about being away. I wrote back,

“Maybe don’t leave.

Or leave and stay.

It’s the same sea.”

But keep your life jacket handy.

Maybe that’s the quiet secret travel teaches. Freedom isn’t detachment. It’s learning to float. To move without panic. To be carried by the same current that once terrified you. The journey becomes the destination. The destination, another ripple in the long safar.


from Rambling of an Itinerant

References

http://anitinerantobserver.blogspot.com/2025/12/life-of-chuck-my-story-my-way.html

http://anitinerantobserver.blogspot.com/2025/11/chicago-to-nyc-notes-from-rails.html

http://anitinerantobserver.blogspot.com/2025/09/fragments-from-pilgrimage-rumi-shams.html


In acknowledgment: Co-piloted with many friends, including GenAI, and nudged by meaningful memory of travel.

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