The Hour We Didn't Get Back

Last night, we all got an hour back. Or so the clocks said...

Nobody woke up an hour richer. The day was the same length it always is. All that changed was the label we put on it and the light. The sun set earlier, the evening arrived sooner, and for a day or two we notice the darkness the way we notice any small rearrangement of a familiar room.

The confusion comes from how we talk about time. We save it, spend it, waste it, as if it were money. But money can sit still. Time cannot. An hour cannot be banked for later; it is spent the moment you live it, whether you choose how or not. The only real choice is how much attention you bring to the time already passing.

That is why the clock change feels oddly moving, though nothing happened. It exposes the machinery: the clock is a map, not the territory. We live by the map so completely that we forget the territory is just light and dark, seasons turning, a body aging at its own pace regardless of what the numbers say.

No hour is coming back to us; not as punishment, but because hours were never ours to keep. They are ours only to live. And living them, attentively, is the whole of it...