What Does Time Do?
My twelve year old daughter and I went back to the village where I was born.
It is not even a town. Teufen is just a small Swiss village, pressed gently into the Appenzeller landscape as if it had no ambition to be more than it is. I lived there until I was nine. From the house where I stayed with my grandparents, I used to walk to kindergarten and later to school. In my memory, that walk was long. I crossed wide fields, climbed mountains, moved through valleys. It felt heroic. A corridor of weather and mood. A daily expedition.
Now it takes a few minutes.
The path is narrow. The hills are low. The slope that once felt like a climb toward destiny is barely a rise. Everything is shorter than it used to be. Less dramatic. Less charged.
I had the strange sensation that I was too large for the place.
Like a giant who has wandered into a carefully built miniature world. The proportions were wrong. Or rather, they had changed.My daughter walked beside me. For her, this is just a village. For me, it is a former universe.
And that is when the thought came.
Nothing here has shrunk. The asphalt did not contract. The houses did not bend inward. The distance did not betray me.
I grew.
Childhood magnifies reality. A short road becomes a journey. A teacher becomes an authority carved in stone. A playground conflict becomes a war. The world is enormous because you are small, and everything towers over you, physically and existentially.
When you return as an adult, you discover that the mountains were modest hills all along.
Walking there, I wondered about another return. Not to a place, but to a life.
One day, if I am old and looking back at the decades I have lived, at the continents crossed, the battles fought, the humiliations, the loves, the political storms, the private collapses, will they also appear reduced? Will the crises that felt tectonic reveal themselves as manageable slopes? Will the nights that seemed endless compress into brief passages?
Perhaps the drama of adulthood is only large because we are still inside it.
The way the village once felt vast because I was nine.
Standing there, oversized in the landscape of my own past, I sensed something unsettling and strangely comforting. The events that once defined me may one day feel like those small houses and short streets. Intense at the time. Overwhelming in proportion. Yet ultimately contained.
Time does not erase.
It does not argue.
It does not console.
Time changes scale.
It lets us live inside a storm, and then one day hands us a map and shows us how small the territory was.
My daughter walked beside me, still inhabiting a world of proper scale. Her distances are long. Her mountains are high. Her fears and triumphs are enormous, as they should be.
I did not tell her that one day she might return somewhere and feel too large for her own memories. That she might stand in the geography of her childhood and feel that quiet vertigo.
For now, she lives inside her vastness.
And I walk through my miniature past, aware that even the biggest chapters of my life may one day look like this village.
Still there.
Intact.
Just smaller than I remember.
So what does time do?
It resizes.
Not the world.
Us.