I enjoy the time passing. I think it's a privilege to be in

In the serene and luminous words of Agnès Varda, the poet of cinema and philosopher of the everyday, we find a truth that belongs to the wise and the gentle-hearted: “I enjoy the time passing. I think it’s a privilege to be in friendship with time.” These words are simple as morning light, yet within them rests an ocean of reflection. In an age that fears the passing of days — that clings to youth, success, and the illusion of permanence — Varda speaks as one who has made peace with the rhythm of existence. To be in friendship with time is not merely to accept it, but to cherish its flow, to walk beside it as a companion rather than to flee from it as an enemy.

The origin of this thought springs from the heart of Varda’s life and art. Known as the “grandmother of the French New Wave,” she lived through decades of creation, never ceasing to see beauty in the ordinary or meaning in the mundane. Her films — Cléo from 5 to 7, Vagabond, and The Beaches of Agnès — were meditations on change, mortality, and the quiet dignity of aging. In her later years, Varda often spoke of her joy in growing old, in feeling time not as decay but as companionship. For her, each wrinkle, each passing season, was not a loss but a story — a sign that life had been lived deeply. Her quote, then, is not born of resignation but of gratitude. It is the wisdom of one who has learned that time, when befriended, ceases to wound.

To say that one is in friendship with time is to live without bitterness toward the inevitable. It is to see that time does not take from us so much as it gives — that every passing moment offers something new, even as it carries something away. Most people live in quarrel with time: they race against it, mourn its passage, or seek to deny it through endless distractions. But the one who befriends time learns a gentler art — the art of presence. To enjoy “the time passing” is to taste each moment without demanding it last forever, to embrace the truth that beauty’s sweetness lies precisely in its impermanence.

The ancients, too, understood this. The philosopher Marcus Aurelius, emperor and stoic, wrote that to live wisely is to “accept whatever time brings as nature’s gift.” He compared the flow of time to a river, whose current we cannot halt, but in which we may learn to swim with grace. Those who fight the current exhaust themselves; those who drift with it find peace. Varda’s friendship with time is the same harmony the Stoics sought — not indifference, but alignment. To be in friendship with time is to live in accordance with the universe’s rhythm, to feel that every dawn and dusk is a greeting, not a farewell.

We see this truth in the life of Agnès Varda herself. Even in her nineties, she continued to create, traveling, filming, and speaking with the same curiosity she had in youth. Her final works, made with tenderness and humor, were not laments for lost years but celebrations of the present. In one scene, she stands on a beach — silver-haired, smiling, her feet in the sand — and says that the sea, like life, is always in motion, always new. She understood that to befriend time is to befriend change, to see in every ending the seed of another beginning. She turned aging into art, and time itself into her muse.

This wisdom extends beyond the artist’s life and into every human heart. For each of us must decide whether time will be our enemy or our ally. Those who resist it, fearing loss, spend their lives in mourning for what cannot be held. But those who befriend it — who thank time for its gifts, its lessons, its fleeting joys — find a deeper kind of happiness. They no longer measure life in years gained or lost, but in moments lived fully. The days become not a dwindling supply, but a flowing abundance — each one unique, each one precious.

So, my child, learn from Agnès Varda, who smiled at the passing of time as one smiles at an old friend. Do not rush your hours, nor clutch them too tightly. Watch the sun rise and fall, and know that both are blessings. Celebrate your youth without fear, and your age without regret. Let time be your teacher, not your tyrant. See in its passage not the fading of life, but its unfolding.

For in truth, as Varda teaches, to be in friendship with time is to be in friendship with life itself. It is to walk hand in hand with change, to find beauty even in endings, and to understand that every heartbeat, every breath, every fleeting second is a gift — a conversation between the soul and eternity. Those who master this art will never grow old, for their hearts will remain open, curious, and grateful, at peace with the endless, wondrous flow of time.