What If True Luxury Were Time?

I had decided to write about my creative process. I wanted to explain that, with time, we make beautiful things — perhaps not perfect, but true, authentic… and in the end, I am sharing with you the journey that led me here, to this very moment.

For a long time, I lived with an inner urgency.
A feeling that I had to go fast.
To understand fast. To succeed fast. To build fast.

As if time were an adversary to be mastered… that famous control — it speaks to you, I imagine? As if I had to outrun it to deserve anything.

I wanted to save time.
To optimise. To anticipate. To accelerate.
But in truth, I drifted away from myself — and above all, I wore myself out, deeply.

I was often in the past, analysing, understanding, digesting.
Understanding has always been essential to me.
Making sense. Ordering. Integrating.

Then, almost without realising it,
I would tip into the future.
The next goal.
The next step.
The next “when.”

And in the midst of all this…
the present grew blurred.

It took the body speaking.
Health troubles arriving to slow the pace.
Like silent signposts:
“You are going too fast.”
“You are going to hurt yourself.”
“You are doing too much.”

So I began to settle (it wasn’t really a choice, mind you…)
To try to understand why this pursuit of “full throttle, all the time, fast, perfect.”

And I understood something simple and dizzying:
to be in the present moment is not a performance.
It is a practice of humility, and of faith (without speaking of religion).

It is accepting that we cannot master everything.
It is accepting that now is enough. And that all is as it should be.

Looking at certain photos of my children,
I realised there are entire periods I have forgotten.
I was there.
But I was not truly there.

I had having on my mind.
What I had to build.
What I had to secure.
What I had to prove.

Here is a story I often heard in India:
“You (meaning Westerners) spend your lives chasing after power, money, possessions; you want to HAVE in order to BE. And when yet another sign comes from your body — a serious illness, for instance — you are determined to spend everything you amassed in order to heal.”

In other words, we will give everything to recover what we ignored.

What if we reversed the race?

What if we chose to be before having.
To love what we do.
To accept who we are (to forgive, to release… to love).
To inhabit our days instead of merely passing through them.

I deeply believe that when we are aligned,
when we create from authenticity,
we become a natural magnet.

The universe answers to what is true.
It supports what is embodied.

To answer this article’s question, true luxury is perhaps not having more time.
But living fully the time we are given. Being there, here, now, without running.

And letting life come to us.

Warmly,