Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Merton

Merton’s line smuggles a quiet provocation inside a soothing cadence: stop chasing. The syntax starts with a collective “we,” implicating the reader in a shared, almost comical condition of spiritual restlessness, then flips the script with “it is there all the time.” That blunt, flat clause punctures the modern fantasy that meaning is a distant achievement unlocked by hustle, novelty, or self-optimization. What we want isn’t “out there”; it’s already ambient, like a radio signal we’ve been too noisy to receive.

The intent is less inspirational than diagnostic. Merton isn’t promising that the universe will hand you answers; he’s arguing that our attention is the bottleneck. “If we give it time” reads like a monastic rebuke to speed: not just patience, but a disciplined willingness to sit through boredom, uncertainty, and the ego’s tantrums. The subtext is that seeking can become its own addiction - a spiritual consumerism where the hunt substitutes for arrival. Time, in Merton’s framing, isn’t a neutral backdrop; it’s the medium that reveals what frantic striving keeps hidden.

Context matters: Merton was a Trappist monk writing in mid-century America, as mass media, suburban abundance, and Cold War anxiety accelerated the culture’s tempo. His work repeatedly circles the same critique: the self that is always reaching is a self that is not present. The line works because it refuses the heroic narrative of self-making and replaces it with a harder ask: receptivity, stillness, and the humility to believe that what’s most real doesn’t need to be manufactured.