Let’s get one thing straight: time isn’t your calendar or that annoying clock on your wall. Henri Bergson tells us to ditch the idea of time as a bunch of neatly stacked seconds. Instead, he says time is more like a river—fluid, continuous, impossible to slice into pieces. Ever tried cutting water? Exactly.

Think about your last vacation. You don’t remember it as 1,209 minutes, do you? No, you recall the vibe—maybe the laughter over bad wine, the sunset that left you speechless, or that hilarious moment when you tripped over a pebble (and pretended it didn’t happen). That’s Bergson’s point: time isn’t made of fragments, it’s a whole experience.

In today’s hyper-scheduled world, this feels revolutionary. We’re obsessed with squeezing every drop of productivity out of each minute, but what if we stopped? What if we let time flow and embraced the messy, magical, uninterrupted ride?

Bergson, a Nobel Prize-winning philosopher, cooked up this idea not in some ivory tower but by watching how people actually live. Fun fact: his work inspired Marcel Proust, who spent seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time exploring how memory bends time like a contortionist. Bergson reminds us that life isn’t about counting moments but making moments count.

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