What super power do you wish you had and why?
There is a question that travels well — ask it at a dinner table, a classroom, a quiet 2 a.m. conversation — and it always lands with the same peculiar weight. What superpower do you wish you had? People smile, lean back, and begin. Flight. Invisibility. Healing. Strength. The answers arrive easily, cheerfully, wrapped in the bright packaging of childhood imagination. But press a little further — why that one, what would you do first — and something shifts. The cheerfulness gives way to something more tender. And almost always, beneath whatever power someone names, you find the same quiet ache: the wish to not miss what is passing.
The superpower I wish I had is not flight. It is not invisibility. If I am honest — the kind of honest that arrives only in stillness — the superpower I wish I had is a form of radical, unbreakable presence. The ability to be fully here, without the mind’s constant drift toward what already happened or what might yet come. To live in a moment completely, so that when it ends, nothing is left behind in the blur.
We do not lose moments to time. We lose them to our own divided attention — half-living every hour, whole-mourning it later.
The Moments We Most Want to Return
Consider the ordinary Tuesday. Not a birthday. Not an anniversary. Just a Tuesday — coffee cooling on a windowsill, someone you love reading across the room, a particular quality of morning light that seems almost to hum. Your phone is in your hand. You are, technically, present. But you are also partially elsewhere: in a message you haven’t replied to, in a vague worry that has no specific shape, in the rehearsal of a conversation that hasn’t happened yet. The Tuesday passes. The light changes. You do not photograph it because it does not seem like the kind of moment that requires a photograph. And then, years later, something calls it back — a smell, a chord, a quality of winter afternoon — and you realize: that Tuesday was extraordinary. You were simply not paying the right kind of attention.
This is the texture of the grief that lives beneath most superpower fantasies. Not the grief of catastrophe. The grief of the ordinary, missed. The grief of the laugh you half-heard. And, he grief of the conversation that ended without you knowing it was the last of its kind. We do not mourn the moments we chose to skip. We mourn the ones we were present for, but not fully present for — the ones we lived at a distance of about three inches from our own experience.
Then, we do not lose moments to time. We lose them to our own divided attention — half-living every hour, whole-mourning it later.
Memory Is Not Retrieval
There is a paradox threaded through all of this. If you knew — truly knew, in the moment — how much a particular hour would matter later, would you be more present? Or would the awareness of its preciousness make you anxious, grasping, unable to settle into it? This is the trap that makes full presence so elusive: we cannot hold something too tightly without altering it. The act of thinking I must remember this is already a departure from the thing itself. You are no longer in the moment. You are managing it, cataloguing it, pre-grieving it. Which is its own kind of loss.
The superpower I wish I had would sidestep all of this. Not through the mechanics of time travel — revisiting the past holds its own cruelties, and the past we wish to return to may never have existed quite as we remember it. Memory is not storage; it is reconstruction. Every act of remembering rewrites slightly. The Tuesday you revisit is already a composite, smudged by longing. No — the superpower I want is upstream of all that. It is not a power over time. It is a quality of being in it.
Memory does not retrieve the past. It rebuilds it — and every rebuilding is shaped by who you have become since.
We Do Not Lose Time. We Lose Presence
Actually, we live in an age that militates against this, systematically and by design. Every screen we carry is an engine of elsewherness. The architecture of our attention has been colonized by a thousand competing claims, each one urgent, each one engineered to feel more important than the unremarkable Tuesday you are sitting inside. We have built entire industries around the fear of missing out on other people’s moments, while our own slide past us at full speed, unacknowledged and unlived.
And yet the longing is ancient. It runs through every elegy ever written, every prayer of return, every ceremony that tries to collapse time and make the past present again. Proust spent seven volumes trying to recover a single madeleine-soaked afternoon. Augustine cried out across centuries: our heart is restless until it rests in thee — and what is restlessness but the condition of a mind that cannot settle into where it is? This is not a modern problem. It is a human one. We have always lived in the gap between the moment and our experience of it.
What shifts, when awareness deepens, is not the moments themselves — they remain as ordinary and transient as ever. What shifts is your relationship to their ordinariness. A Tuesday is no longer something to get through. It becomes a thing to be lived, once, irreversibly, in full. The light on the windowsill is not background. The laugh is not ambient noise. Everything that was texture becomes substance.
To Wish For The Power To Pause Time
The superpower I wish I had, I think, already exists. It is called attention — deliberate, unhurried, non-anxious attention. It is not dramatic. And, it cannot be photographed or posted. It leaves no trace except the particular way it changes you, slowly, from the inside. We do not practice it because it is unglamorous and because the world around us does not reward it. But it is, I think, the only power that would actually give us what we are looking for when we answer that dinner-table question with something bright and winged and impossible.
What we want is not to fly. What we want is to arrive, fully, at the life we are already living.
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