As If We Won’t
I just finished The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. I’m not entirely sure why I picked it up, but I’ve been thinking about our use of time lately and how much, and how little, we have of it. I was seeking to define time or understand it better, and as I think about goals and regrets, both mine and those of my father, it seemed like something I could think about concretely. I like logic and explanation. I had no real concept of quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and entropy before reading it save for a high school physics class and reading out of curiosity. I still really don’t, but that doesn’t diminish the value of the book. Understanding them doesn’t change the lesson.
Rovelli’s work dismantles the idea that time is fixed. Physics tells us that time is local and relational. It stretches, compresses, and dissolves entirely at the fundamental level of reality. It only exists between us, and between memory and anticipation, like music. Our present is only for us - everyone has a different present. Even if I am right in front of another person, even touching them, our present is not the same. We are perceiving each other at a different time, albeit a minuscule difference, but never the same.
But, we know time is finite. We see death constantly. We experience loss. We mark anniversaries. We carry absence. Still, we plan as if none of it applies to us. We defer and optimize for later. We live, quite convincingly, as if we have time.
In international education, this illusion is structural. We operate in long timelines: strategic plans, multi-year partnerships, enrollment pipelines that stretch across continents and calendars, policy frameworks that lag reality by years. We talk about “future students,” “long-term impact,” “sustainable growth.” All of that matters, but it also assumes that we have continuity, stability, and, yes, time; however, the reality we operate within is anything but stable:
Visa policies change overnight
Geopolitical tensions reshape mobility flows
Students make life-altering decisions within compressed timelines
Opportunities appear and disappear faster than our systems can respond
We build five-year plans in a field where the ground shifts every six months, and there is a professional absurdity in that. Planning isn’t wrong, but we rarely acknowledge how volatile those timelines might be. Perhaps right now is a reckoning.
I just returned from a recruitment tour. Interacting with students who are just starting to think about studying abroad for a degree in the environment we are in is… complicated. At times I felt encouraged at the enthusiasm for study in the United States, at times defeated. At others, I justified my presence thinking that when the students start applying it will be 2.5 years down the road, and “Things will be different.” Won’t they? Bright and early back in the office Monday morning, I had a conversation with a student interested in studying in Barcelona. Being an upcoming junior, she felt she has just one chance - next spring. Institutions operate on extended horizons. Students do not.
A student’s “window” is narrow. Four years, if that. One chance to study abroad. One visa approval or denial. One decision that changes the trajectory of a life. We talk about access, opportunity, global engagement, but these are too abstract for students. Students operate in time-bound realities. Miss the moment, and it’s gone. There is no “we’ll revisit this in the next strategic cycle” for a student who aged out of an opportunity or couldn’t navigate a system in time.
There is a gap between what we know and how we behave, and there is a cost to assuming we have more time. The gap shows up everywhere. We delay institutional change because it’s complex. We postpone difficult decisions because the system can absorb the delay. We assume there will be another recruitment cycle, another partnership opportunity, another chance to get it right. Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t, and the difference is rarely visible in advance.
So what changes if we stop pretending? Not everything. You don’t dismantle systems or abandon long-term thinking because time is fragile, but you might make different choices about where urgency belongs. You might act faster on partnerships that matter instead of over-engineering them. You might prioritize student-facing decisions that are time-sensitive rather than administratively convenient. You might recognize that “later” is often a polite fiction.
Personally, you might notice the same pattern. There is the email you don’t send - I torture myself thinking about the emails I did not send when I had the chance, the words that would have mattered and now can’t be delivered. There is the personal project you keep meaning to start, deferred to some cleaner season that never quite arrives. The conversation you delay because it is uncomfortable or because it is too real. All filed under: there will be time.
At the end of The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli references the Mahabharata, where Yaksha asks Yudhisthir what the greatest mystery is. He answers: “Every day countless people die, and yet those who remain live as if they were immortals.”
Understanding this changes less than we would like. Even in the Mahabharata, the point is not that people are ignorant. It’s that they are aware and still behave this way, which is the mystery and the wonder. The goal is not to walk around in existential awareness of death, which is not functional, and frankly, not productive. We can be selective and identify the few places where the illusion of endless time is costing something real, and act there, where it matters.
Finishing The Order of Time didn't leave me with answers. I do sense a shift in how I see the structure of my days. Time is less solid than we think. It is less reliable and less guaranteed, but, maybe, it is more valuable precisely because of that. The Mahabharata doesn’t resolve the contradiction and neither does Rovelli. We see people die every day. And still, we live as if we won’t.
So ask yourself where, exactly, in your life and work, you’re willing to stop pretending.