steeped by samia no.40 | 07.10.25
Oh, to be 27 and reflect on the complexities of time—while acknowledging that you’re only scraping the surface of it all.
When I was younger, we had two circle clocks on the walls with birds in place of numbers. If analog clocks were hard for you to decipher as a child, imagine the confusion you’d have learning to tell time from a bird clock, lol. A different bird would sound off to mark the beginning of each waking hour—both annoying and iconic. I especially remember the great horned owl’s hoots and was delighted to hear a similar bird sound irl, early one morning from my window.
One bird clock had a dark green frame and the other was a honeyed wood tone. The green one was in our living room for the longest time, and it’s now somewhere in our storage room because of construction. The wooden one? I’m not sure where it is or if we still have it. I searched “bird clock” on Google, and I didn’t realize so many people had this clock in their childhood homes (r/nostalgia immediately came up).
I love this connection of birds and time. I find bird-watching to be a noble, slow activity (my cats love to bird-watch, and so does Amy Tan, chronicled in this beautiful book). Nature calmly and assertively subverts the ways that western society funnels us onto paths that attempt to squeeze as much “productivity” out of us in 24 hours. Reading How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell while writing this piece was an important reminder to make space for being with nature and our local communities in our day-to-day lives. And how these things can re-orient time to be more expansive.
Time is a strong current in Steeped by Samia. Right now, it’s wading into 27 and feeling and witnessing the shifting emotions and prophecies of what it means to be alive and live a fulfilling life. I’m someone who firmly believes that aging is an expansive thing: meeting new versions of ourselves who can take on different goals and priorities, while figuring out how we can best be of service to our communities and the world. I need to experience this era of Samia—the blurring days of my mid to late 20’s—to give me the tools to sustainably build the life I want to live.
Here, I bring you reflective vignettes on time, a follow up of sorts to Steeped No.15 exploring the strange-ness of time.
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I. You, me, and the Zeigarnik Effect.
On a podcast walk around my neighborhood, the “Zeigarnik effect” came up*. It made stop in my tracks and re-listen to the portion explaining it.
Zeigarnik effect (def.): a psychological phenomenon where people tend to remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed ones.
*I wish I can recall the specific podcast, ugh! There’s a good chance it was either Hidden Brain or The Good Life Project.
This put language to something I didn’t know I was constantly feeling the weight of. Freelancing and working on 3-4 different brand projects at a time has been the norm for me, plus 1-2 passion projects on deck. Even before my official work life started, I’d juggle so many things in college: full course loads each semester and being a residential assistant (RA), MSA Club president, Asian Heritage Month lead organizer, the list goes on. So, this mental clutter—and especially unclosed loops of work—are especially sticky in my brain.
Most of the time, these incomplete tasks are of my own (un)doing and, occasionally, it makes me feel like I’ve let people down when something hasn’t come to fruition. More than just the unfulfilled check box, it’s the interpersonal stake that can feel weighted.
It’s taken me a long time to acknowledge how this mental clutter has bogged down my day-to-day life and to figure out how to alleviate it. Because, truly, who or what is it serving? Not me, clearly. Just get it done or deprioritize it! Or, if it keeps coming up, being able to discern why it’s coming up over and over and if that’s telling you something.
I’m curious about people who are busy or “high performing” and have a wide social circle or community they maintain. People who feel like they have 48 hours in a day. We tend to project assumptions onto them—like, how much their time and energy is worth, as if it’s an invisible currency.
When we distill it down, we’re all just human and have our own set of expectations and values and weight to move through. And when we think of these “high performing” people in our lives, how many unfinished tasks clutter their minds? How have they learned to keep moving forward?
Back to my tension with the Zeigarnik effect, the lesson I’ve learned is that: you don’t have to wait for a specific time (ie the first of the month) or catalyst to enter your life in order to sort, clear, and close off these incomplete tasks to make space for newer ones. In this act of cleaning and organizing my mind, it feels like I’m shedding skin—or molting feathers—uncomfy but also necessary. And so freeing.
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II. To age is to be privy to the interplay between the past, present, and future.
I stumbled upon Toni Morrison’s poignant and honest 2004 Commencement Speech at Wellesley College on YouTube, while eating breakfast one day last week.
The heading of this section aligns with how I feel about Toni Morrison: when I read her books and essays or watch interviews with her, Toni Morrison’s incisive language and perspective makes me feel like she had a strong command of time, as though she could distinguish the individual shapes and colors in the view of a kaleidoscope.
In this speech, Toni Morrison says:
“I’m sure you have been told that this is the best time of your life. It may be. But if it’s true that this is the best time of your life, if you have already lived or are now living at this age the best years, or if the next few turn out to be the best—then, you have my condolences…
There is nothing more satisfying, more gratifying, than true adulthood. The adulthood that is the span of life before you. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. It’s achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard one glory which commercial forces and cultural vapidities should not be permitted to deprive you of.”
— Toni Morrison
I appreciate how Toni Morrison speaks about the liminality between adolescence and adulthood. It’s difficult to make pronouncements of how we should feel about the current time we’re living in, both personally and societally. It makes me think: to age is to give space to these emotions as they come up, alongside what we witness and experience.
Something I’m currently thinking about: As we get older, how do we balance our journeys of self-actualization with our responsibility to helping our communities and world? In what ways do these two things blur, and how do we do focus on one without losing sight of the other?
My hope is that we all have time to carve out of our schedules to reflect on our lives—somewhere where we can be quiet and present and not stimulated or prompted by technology—and find direction in what want to do more of or less of to find balance and alignment.
Btw: I highly recommend you listen to the whole speech; Toni Morrison is honest and candid and grapples with generational perspectives on life, while pointing out “the elephant in the room” of 2004’s political climate.
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III. A hospital is not an art museum, but it can be
Below is a snippet from Steeped No.4 (2022)—a thread on time. I think this is one of the best pieces I’ve ever written.
“When you’re in the hospital for that long,” my Abu would say, “You don’t really know what day it is.”
The time of day, the days of the week, sunrise and sunset. It all starts to feel the same. Time loses its meaning, its consistency. It all muddles together like different colors of clay. In one of my Abu’s hospital rooms, there was a clock on the wall with hands that spun around too quickly. It made us laugh—“We’re time traveling!”—but it was also kind of symbolic.
“I didn’t get a good night’s sleep in over a month,” he would say. There’s a chuckle in his voice. Continue Reading.
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IV. The seeds we plant continue to live on—so, in some way, don’t we also live on?
My dad and sister have been growing some avocado, fig, and white peach trees. They’re so small, but growing steadily. My dad is ready to plant them in our backyard. Today, we were talking about how it’ll take decades and decades for them to be huge and flourishing, bearing fruit and shade.
“Yeah, someday when I’m not here anymore, you’ll be able to reach outside the sunroom window and pluck some fruit!” My dad said. I felt that jolt of time—a millisecond flash-forward to the future to a chapter of life where my parents are not alive. The world is quiet.
I’m reminded of my dear family-friend Marcy; there is a huge and gorgeous redwood tree in her backyard that she planted many years ago, and I’m in awe every time I see it. When we do the work of planting and tending trees and botanicals, it’s clarifying to think about the people, animals, and nature that we will not know, who will benefit from them for years to come.
This past weekend, on our way to Lake Tahoe, we visited the cemetery in Livermore where many of our family members rest, including my paternal grandparents and maternal grandmother. It’s a patch of land surrounded by dry hills and windmills. Bunnies and squirrels scurry among the graves.
It’s an eerie feeling to be there, to be connected to mortality in such a strong way. But it’s also calming. To be able to visit our loved ones there, pray for them, and catch them up on how things are going. Someday, we’ll be resting somewhere, in some form, for centuries. And this rest stop will be longer than our lives.
We live on in beautiful ways we cannot see. And our past, present, and future continue to be connected in otherworldly ways.
— S.A.
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V. Journal prompts to move through Time:
- What does a year look like in your head? What stretches of time are shorter or longer, slower or faster? (a reference to Steeped No. 31—on “when things come back around again”)
- Write down the first thing that pops up in your mind: What image or phrase comes up when you think of the Past? Present? Future?
- What beliefs, perspectives, or ideas have you heard about time and aging? Which ones impact you and which ones do you shrug off? How have your own views on aging shifted throughout time?
- We are constantly in a trade off, it feels, between fulfillment, adventure, responsibility, rest, creativity, service, recognition, stability, relationships, spirituality, etc. How do these themes show up in your current period of time and how you craft your schedule?
- I’m borrowing this question from a YouQuiz interview with BTS that I saw on YouTube, lol: If you were to write the story of your life, what would the first line be?
🔗 Steep On This:
- A book: Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
- A song: Yun (with Erykah Badu) by RM—album on repeat rn
- A tv show: Adults (2025)—this show is ridic, I luv it
- A newsletter: (Cult)ure of Beauty by Hajar
- An obsession: Hair claw clips—in my low bun era, lol
- A tea: Mango Black Tea by BOH
💫 Catch Up:
06.16.25 | To try and try, and do it all over again
steeped by samia no.39: There’s nowhere to go but simultaneously forward and upside-down.
💌 About This Blog:
Steeped by Samia is a space where I can simmer on thoughts & curiosities about life, liminal spaces, digital culture, & more. Far too often, my writing ideas fizzle out in energy; I never get to see them to their full potential. While building my rhythm with writing, I want to share these stories with you.
Subscribe for Free by adding your email and clicking the ‘subscribe’ button at the bottom of the page. Make sure to confirm your subscription in the email you’ll receive from WordPress. You will then receive an email or WordPress notification every time I post (just like a Substack, lol)! I aim to publish a new blog post 1-2 times a month. Thank you for supporting my storytelling! 🧡
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Thank you, as always, for reading and supporting, Nivs!!
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