Fall didn’t ease in this year. From where I sit, the rain came all at once, the temperature dropped more than ten degrees in what felt like an afternoon, and the ducks and I cut our morning walk short for the first time in months. Summer didn’t slip out the back door this year. If you ask me, it got up and left mid-sentence.

So, I started thinking about light. Specifically, about where we put it.

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Here in British Columbia, this is the first autumn in more than seventy years that we won’t “fall back.” The province has made daylight saving permanent. So, when November comes, and most of the continent turns its clocks back an hour, we simply… won’t. The clocks stay where they are, for good.

It was sold to us as more evening light in winter, and that’s true. But I want to call out what it actually is, because it pretends to be about clocks. It’s not really about clocks.

We won’t get more light. There IS no more light. December has exactly as much darkness as it always did. What we did was decide where to put the light we have. We took an hour from the winter morning and moved it to the winter evening. Which means, come deep December, the sun won’t be up until nearly nine in the morning. Sunrise at nine. Dark by five.

We didn’t make more day. We just chose where to spend it.

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Wherever you are in the world, whether your clocks are going back or not, this is the truth about the timekeeping.

You don’t get more light. Not in December. Not in a life. You get a finite amount of daylight, a finite amount of energy, a finite number of good hours in a day, and the only real question is where you decide to spend them.

Most of us don’t decide. We let the clock of obligation decide for us. We pour our brightest hours into whatever shouts loudest. The inbox, the to-do list, the people who demand rather than the people who matter. We spend our light on the urgent and hope there’s some left over for the things that are actually precious. There often isn’t. At least not enough. The light runs out, the way it always does, and we wonder where the day went.

But you can decide. That’s the invitation of this whole season. In fact, the tidy, practical energy in the air right now is practically built for it. You can look at your finite daylight, in whatever form it takes for you, and place it on purpose.

Where do your best hours go? I don’t mean the leftover hours, but the best ones, the clearest and most alive. Are you spending them on what matters, or just on what’s loud? Are you giving your morning light to your own work, your own body, your own awareness, or handing it all away before you’ve even had a chance to be a person?

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The belief that won’t survive this week

“There isn’t enough time.”

There isn’t. That part’s true. There has never been enough, and there never will be. You will not, at the end of any day, have gotten to everything.

But “there isn’t enough time” is usually pointing at the wrong problem. It’s not that you have too little light. It’s that you haven’t decided where to put it, so it gets spent for you, scattered across everything, concentrated on very little. The exhaustion you might feel isn’t from a shortage of hours. It’s from never choosing.

You can’t make the day longer. But you can decide, deliberately, what gets your nine o’clock and what gets your five o’clock. And that single act of choosing that this goes here, and that doesn’t get my best light, changes everything about how a day feels, even when the day is exactly as short as it was before.

In other words, scarcity you can’t control. Placement you can.

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I’ll tell you what this change means for me, practically, and why I’ve been turning it over.

My work runs from dawn to nine at night. That’s the rhythm of it. I’m reachable from first light to the end of the evening. It’s how I’ve built my days for years, and it’s suited me.

But what I hadn’t reckoned with until now is that come December, “dawn” is nine in the morning. My light and my workday used to begin together, in the dark-early quiet before the world woke up. And now the province has moved my morning light later, and I get to decide, consciously, what to do with the dark hour it left behind.

I think I’m going to give it to myself. The dark morning before the light comes, before the day is reachable, before I’m anything to anyone…coffee, quiet contemplation. The cat and the ducks, once it’s light enough for them to be safe(r). An hour that belongs to no one but me, precisely because the light hasn’t arrived to start the day yet.

That’s my choice. The dark handed me an hour, and I’m not going to spend it the way I spend the rest. I’m going to place it.

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Winter is coming. It always is. The dark is non-negotiable. And no province, or clock, or amount of willpower makes December longer or brighter.

But how you arrange your light inside the dark is yours. Entirely, always yours.

So as the season turns and the days pull in, I’ll ask you the question I’m asking myself, which is NOT how do I get more time – because you can’t; none of us can – but where am I spending the light I have? And is that where I actually want it to go?

You have a finite, precious amount of daylight. Nobody’s making more.

Spend it on purpose.

Jonni

P.S. Speaking of dawn to nine, yes, that’s still exactly when UNLIMITED runs. You know the drill. You write whenever the words come, and I read closely and write back within the hours that keep me whole. Even when “dawn” is a scandalously late nine in the morning, come December. Some light is worth waiting for.  😉

P.P.S. Next week is a special one. I’m sitting down again with my dear friend, the astrologer Marielle Croft, for our seasonal conversation about what the fall skies hold. She brings the map and the translation. I bring the psychospiritual interpretation. Watch for it.