The old calendar was still tucked beneath a stack of papers, which felt slightly accusatory considering how confidently I had once believed I was organised. I pulled it out, flipped through a few pages and stopped at a month I had not thought about in years. The dates looked painfully ordinary. Tuesday the 14th. Wednesday the 15th. Thursday the 16th. A dentist appointment scribbled in one square. A reminder in another. Most of the boxes were empty. No warning labels. No gold stars. Nothing announcing that one of those completely unremarkable days would later become part of a chapter I would remember with surprising tenderness.

That is what I find suspicious about the phrase “the good old days.” Nobody ever seems to recognise them while they are happening. Apparently, you only discover you were living through a beautiful season several years later, usually after memory has removed most of the inconveniences and applied flattering lighting. At the time, you were probably tired, mildly irritated about something, checking the time, thinking about dinner and waiting for life to become more interesting. Then enough years pass, and suddenly the cramped room becomes cosy, the long commute becomes part of the adventure, and the people you saw constantly become people you now need three calendars, annual leave and possibly a plane ticket to meet. Memory has excellent editing software.

It keeps the laughter and quietly deletes the admin. It remembers the song but softens the stress attached to it. It remembers the friendship and occasionally misplaces the argument. It turns the old house warmer, the old road prettier and the old version of you slightly more charming than she probably was at the time. Nostalgia is not necessarily dishonest, but it is definitely selective. Looking at that calendar, I wondered what had happened on those empty dates. Probably nothing important, at least not by the standards I used then. I may have gone to work, complained that I was tired, eaten something forgettable, answered messages, watched television, worried about something that no longer deserves storage space in my brain, and gone to bed expecting the next day to resemble the one before it. And yet those are exactly the kinds of days I miss from certain seasons.

When I was younger, I thought important moments would announce themselves properly. Milestones would feel like milestones. Turning points would come with appropriate music. I assumed the meaningful parts of life would know how to make an entrance. Birthdays, graduations, promotions, departures and reunions were the obvious landmarks, so surely those were the days worth preserving. But most of what I miss now was never dramatic. It was sitting beside people I assumed I would continue seeing all the time, eating ordinary meals, taking familiar routes, laughing about nonsense, hearing someone moving in another room and complaining about things that, in hindsight, did not deserve nearly the amount of emotional energy I gave them. There are entire seasons I once considered uneventful that now feel precious simply because of who was still there and who I was before certain things changed. That part is mildly embarrassing.

Time has also taught me that I am terrible at estimating when anything happened. I still say “a few years ago” about events that are now old enough to have established careers and strong opinions. There are whole periods of my life that feel recent until I do the maths and immediately regret participating. There should be a warning before calculating how long ago university was. Some memories are emotionally safer without timestamps. Perhaps that is another reason old calendars unsettle me: they provide evidence. Memory says, “That was not long ago,” while the calendar replies, “Please see attached documentation.”

The stranger thing is that while we are living through any particular season, we are usually focused on the one after it. The next job. The next holiday. The next weekend. The next achievement. The next version of ourselves who will supposedly be more disciplined, more rested, more financially sensible and finally using the planner consistently instead of purchasing beautiful stationery as a substitute for behavioural change. Future us gets assigned an unreasonable amount of work, while present us is answering messages, folding laundry badly, travelling to work, buying groceries and waiting for life to feel more significant. Then years pass, and we look back at exactly those ordinary days with affection.

The present has terrible marketing. The past gets nostalgia. The future gets possibility. The present gets washing up. The past arrives beautifully edited. The future arrives full of plans, potential and imaginary competence. The present usually shows up wearing yesterday’s pyjamas and asking what we are having for dinner. No wonder we underestimate it.

I think that is what bothers me most about time. It rarely tells you when to pay attention. There is no notification saying, “This is the last year you will all live near each other.” No pop-up appears to explain, “You will miss this room one day.” Nobody taps you on the shoulder before an ordinary lunch and says, “Remember this properly because there will eventually be a time when you would give quite a lot to sit here again.” We are expected to notice on our own, which feels like poor design.

Of course, not everything in the past deserves to be romanticised. There are years I remember fondly without wanting to live them again. There are places I miss but would not move back to, versions of myself I feel tenderness towards but have absolutely no desire to resurrect, and situations nostalgia occasionally presents in suspiciously flattering colours. Missing something is not always a request to return; sometimes it is simply proof that it mattered. That distinction has become important to me because my relationship with the past has changed. I no longer see it as somewhere I need to revisit and rearrange. I think of it more like an archive. Some folders are useful, some are funny, some are opened carefully, and a few contain photographs that should remain classified for fashion-related reasons.

But archives have value. They remind me that I have already survived things I once thought would flatten me. They remind me that some worries were temporary even when they felt permanent. They show me how many people, plans and priorities have changed. They also remind me that there were good things happening during periods when I was too preoccupied with what came next to appreciate them fully.

The future feels different to me now too. I still think about it. I still make plans. I still have places I want to see, goals I would like to reach and things I hope to build. I have not transformed into someone who floats serenely through life without calendars, lists or expectations. That would be deeply out of character. But I am less interested in designing the future so precisely that I leave no room for it to surprise me. A younger version of me had timelines. Present me has preferences, and I consider that progress.

Planning is useful. I would not advise abandoning it entirely unless you particularly enjoy chaos and expensive last-minute flights. But detailed expectations can become dangerous when we start treating them as promises. Life has an impressive record of ignoring plans without explanation. You can spend years believing something should happen by a certain age, only to discover later that the delay, detour or complete change of direction was not the catastrophe you thought it was. Hindsight, of course, loves this part. Hindsight arrives several years later, fully informed and emotionally stable, and says, “See? It worked out.” Very helpful. Where were you when I was panicking?

Still, I trust time more than I used to. Not because it fixes everything. Some things remain sad. Some losses stay losses. Some questions never become clear. I no longer expect time to magically turn every painful thing into something beautiful. But time changes the size of things. Something that once filled the entire room can eventually become one object in it. The object may remain. You may still notice it. You may still understand exactly how it got there. But you can walk around it now. Other things have entered the room: new people, new memories, new responsibilities and new joys. The thing that once seemed capable of occupying everything no longer has exclusive rights to the space. That matters.

And perhaps that is why I have become more interested in the present, despite its dreadful promotional strategy. The present is rarely glamorous enough to compete with memory or imagination. The past has stories. The future has possibilities. The present has emails. The past has photographs. The future has plans. The present has a laundry basket that somehow regenerates when unattended. But this is where life is: not later, not once work becomes less busy, not after the next achievement, and not when I am better rested, more organised, financially perfect and somehow caught up with everything. It is here, now.

I say that as someone who has repeatedly told herself, “Once this week is over, things will settle down,” only to discover another week standing immediately behind it holding paperwork. Adulthood is basically a series of Thursdays. So I am trying to respect ordinary days more, not worship them or turn every Tuesday into a profound spiritual event because that sounds exhausting, but simply stop requiring a day to be extraordinary before I consider it good. A decent day counts. Good food counts. Getting home safely counts. A conversation that made me laugh counts. A message from somebody I love counts. The cats doing something ridiculous for no reason whatsoever counts. A shift that ends without catastrophe counts. An evening where nobody needs anything urgent and I can simply exist for a while counts. Perhaps these are exactly the days I will miss later.

That thought is comforting and inconvenient at the same time, because it means one day I may look back at the life I am living now and call this period “the good old days.” I may miss things I currently consider routine. I may look at photographs taken now and notice details I barely register today. I may wish I could sit in a room I currently walk through without thinking, hear a voice I currently assume will always answer, or experience one more ordinary evening I had once considered too uneventful to remember. I do not want that awareness to make me frightened of time, and I do not want to spend the present constantly mourning it in advance. I simply want to notice it before nostalgia gets exclusive editing rights.

Eventually, I looked back at the calendar in my hands. Those old squares were still ordinary. No hidden message had appeared. Tuesday was still Tuesday, and Thursday remained stubbornly Thursday. The calendar had never known which days I would remember and which ones would disappear completely, and neither had I. That was probably the point. The days had not failed to announce their importance; I had simply expected importance to look different.

So I closed the calendar and put it back with the papers, although this time I hesitated before leaving it there. Somewhere nearby was another calendar containing today: another ordinary square, another date that currently means almost nothing beyond work, errands, plans and whatever needs doing before bed. Years from now, I may look back and discover that I was already standing inside something I would miss. The past will make it look beautiful, the future will continue making promises, and the present will probably be asking me to fold the laundry. Terrible marketing, really. Still, I think I am finally buying it.

Surprisingly underrated,

Anj