In an earlier piece, I wrote about time about how it slips past the very people who think they are mastering it, and how busyness alone is not living. I wrote about how real happiness is not assembled from relentless motion but from quiet moments in which we remember to be grateful. That reflection stayed with me. But as it settled, another face of the same truth began to emerge deeper, more human, and harder to articulate. It reached me through a man I had the privilege of knowing a man who sometimes saw what others missed, who chose silence where others rushed to fill the air, and who, when he finally did speak, delivered a single sentence worth more than hours of ordinary conversation. May God have mercy on him. I am speaking of Captain Mohammed Al-Huwayti a longtime friend, gentle in his manner, a pilot with Kuwait Airways, and the kind of person whose company always left you thinking more clearly than you had before you met him. One day, I was in the middle of a complaint the tedious kind, about the sluggishness of government bureaucracy, the forms that multiply, the queues that never move. I noticed he had gone quiet. He was not joining in, was not nodding along the way a polite listener does. So, I turned to him and asked: “What is it? You are not yourself today.” He answered my question with a question which, I came to understand, was very much his way. “Do you know what moves fastest in Kuwait?” I told him I did not know. He said: “Time. Time moves faster in Kuwait than anywhere else on earth. A day here passes like a flash of lightning, and it takes years of your life with it years you do not feel going, years you do not even notice are gone until one morning you look in the mirror and your hair has turned white, and the walking stick has become your third leg. That is, if you are not already in a wheelchair with someone pushing you through a shopping mall.” Then he smiled and said: “And do you know why?” I told him to go on. “Because we live inside a blessing. The pressure here is a fraction of what people carry almost anywhere else in the world. Life is comfortable. The government that we love to criticise looks after its citizens from the moment they are born to the moment they are carried to their grave in a municipality vehicle. Kuwait is warm and alive with community every family has its gathering; every expatriate community has its circle and its corner of the city where it does not feel foreign. And the security here, the safety it simply does not exist in the same form anywhere else. But here is the thing: to feel time passing, you need to feel struggle. And struggle is what we have the least of.” Then he asked, with the slight smile of a man who already has the answer: “Do you know who feels time most acutely?” I told him: today seemed to be a day for philosophy and psychology he could proceed. He laughed. Then he said: “No one feels time like the prisoner and the patient.” I have been repeating that sentence for over thirty years. It has never needed a footnote. The prisoner counts the days because his freedom is taken. The patient counts the hours because his body has become a battlefield. Both live time at its full weight and in its full harshness, because both have lost something they once assumed was permanent. As for the rest of us, we swim in our blessings so long and so thoroughly that we mistake them for air. We do not feel them until they are no longer there. The Stoic philosopher Lucius Seneca wrote something that lands differently after hearing Mohammed Al-Huwayti speak: “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.” Time was never scarce. We simply mastered the art of squandering it while persuading ourselves we were spending it well. That is precisely what my friend’s observation awakens in me, every time something narrows my horizon and tightens my chest: complaining does not recover a single lost moment. Only gratitude gives a moment the weight it deserves the weight that makes it worth living. God have mercy on you, my friend. And may you be well rewarded for every soul who heard you and woke up. On the occasion of Eid Al-Adha, I wish you all happy Eid. To all pilgrims making the Hajj may your pilgrimage be accepted, your sins forgiven, and your efforts rewarded.
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