A king waits a short while in the creator's court — and steps home to find that ages have passed and everyone he knew is gone.
King Kakudmi takes his daughter Revatī to Brahmaloka to ask Brahmā for a husband; on returning, twenty-seven catur-yugas have elapsed and everyone he knew is long gone.
— Bhāgavata Purāṇa 9.3
Notice how time already bends within a single day — an hour of grief crawls, an hour of joy vanishes. Let Revatī's story ask you gently: what are you clinging to as permanent that time will quietly carry away? To hold the world lightly is not to love it less, but to rest in what does not pass.
A poetic teaching to sit with and contemplate.
King Kakudmi ascends with his daughter Revatī to Brahmaloka to seek the creator's counsel on her marriage. He waits only for the space of a song, yet when he returns to Earth twenty-seven ages have unfolded: his city, his kin, his whole world have dissolved into memory. The story is tender and unsettling at once — a father's simple errand becomes a lesson in the impermanence of every human attachment.
The Purāṇa is teaching that time is not the fixed, uniform thing we assume. In the nearness of the Divine, the frantic clock of the world falls silent; what feels enduring to us is, from a higher vantage, already gone. For the seeker this is both a warning and a comfort: a warning against building one's whole heart on what must pass, and a comfort that above the churning of ages there is a stillness in which nothing is lost. Kakudmi does not despair — he surrenders his plans and finds his footing again in that higher order.