This time yesterday, it was an hour earlier.
If you're confused, I'm talking about daylight saving.
I don't know about you, but I find the shifting of time twice a year strangely jarring. It always reminds me of the way we humans try to bend time into something that suits the way we've organised our lives.
Suddenly we're getting up an hour earlier so that we can finish the workday sooner and enjoy an extra hour of evening light.
And yet, of course, time itself hasn't changed at all.
The sun is still rising and setting according to its own rhythm. The moon is still moving through her cycle. The seasons continue to turn.
Only the numbers on the clock have changed.
And perhaps that's what I find so interesting about daylight saving. It's a small, twice-yearly reminder that the time we live by isn't necessarily the same as the time of the natural world.
We have divided the day into hours and minutes. We've created calendars, schedules, deadlines and appointments. We've decided when the working day begins, when school starts, when lunch happens and when we're supposed to go to sleep.
All of this is useful. I don't want to suggest we should abandon our clocks and return to sundials!
But somewhere along the way, I think we've become so accustomed to clock time that we can forget there are other ways of experiencing time.
There is sun time.
There is seasonal time.
There is lunar time.
And there is the time of our own bodies.
These kinds of time aren't particularly interested in being efficient.
They don't care whether you've ticked everything off your to-do list.
The moon doesn't hurry through her waning phase because you have somewhere to be. Winter doesn't arrive late because you're not quite ready for it. Your body doesn't necessarily have the same amount of energy every day simply because your calendar says it's Tuesday.
Nature moves through cycles of expansion and contraction, activity and rest, light and darkness.
And we are part of that nature.
Perhaps this is why the shift into daylight saving can feel so strangely disorienting. For a moment, we're reminded that the clock is not actually the source of time. It's simply a way we've chosen to measure it.
And when we spend our lives measuring ourselves against the clock, it's easy to start believing that we're supposed to be productive at a constant rate too.
But what if we aren't?
What if there are times for doing and times for being?
Times to begin and times to complete.
Times to reach outward and times to draw inward.
Times when we feel full of energy and ideas, and times when we need to slow down, rest and gather ourselves.
The natural world has never stopped working this way.
We just stopped paying attention.
So as we adjust our clocks this season, perhaps it's worth noticing what happens when we stop looking at the clock for a moment.
Notice when the sun rises.
Notice when the evening light begins to fade.
Notice the phase of the moon.
Notice how your own energy feels from day to day.
You might discover that your body has its own sense of time.
And perhaps living in rhythm doesn't mean rejecting the clock.
It simply means remembering that the clock is not the only way to keep time.
Because time hasn't changed.
We have simply changed the numbers we use to describe it.
If you're curious about how you can work with nature's time along side our modern calendar, you can order my lunar diary.