One second feels like a fleeting moment. Yet, that second is packed with countless forms of motion and transformation of matter, atoms, electrons, and light, all unfolding simultaneously on remarkably short, yet vastly different timescales. All of these phenomena can be probed experimentally, and many techniques rely on timescale matching. In this colloquium, I invite the audience on a journey into the world of ultrafast processes. We will begin with millisecond and microsecond-scale processes from everyday life and descend into progressively shorter time intervals, down to the fastest transformations still measurable experimentally. This talk is accessible to physicists and astronomers of all backgrounds.