HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, March 11, 2025 – Time has a feeling. We associate certain times of the day with certain activities and therefore certain feelings. Mornings are typically for waking up, which means we engage in activities that help us do that. Evenings, on the other hand, have a whole different feeling. Evenings are typically for winding down, and our activities reflect that.

But what if time is changed? What if morning isn’t quite yet morning and evening not quite yet evening? What if the morning is not yet dawn and the evening not yet dusk? Would we still want to do the same activities an hour and half ahead of what our body is telling us is the “real time”? Because our body knows exactly what time it is, even if consciously we don’t.

When I was a kid, my bedtime was 8 p.m. sharp. I remember that, because I always had trouble falling asleep in the summertime. I remember lying in bed and staring out the window at the sunshine. And no matter how hard I tried, I could not get to sleep.

In real time in Halifax, 8 p.m. in the summertime is dark. What I mean by “real time” is solar time. In Daylight Savings Time, it’s not dark until nearly 9:30 p.m., which is almost an hour and a half later. If, as a kid, I’d gone to bed at 9:30 DST instead of 8:00 DST, I would have conked out the minute my head hit the pillow.

As a culture, we have the perpetual feeling that time is getting faster and faster and that our days just fly by. Is it possible instead that the shift from “real time” (solar time) to “fake time” (DST and Standard Time) has robbed us of our true sense of time, and in so doing has made us feel that we’re always falling behind? Our body says it’s one time, while our clock claims it’s much later.

Take now, for instance. My laptop clock tells me it’s nearly 12 noon, but my solar clock says it’s just 10:30 a.m. These two times bring with them entirely different feelings related to the activities attached to them. They also have entirely different qualities of sunlight. So if my body is telling me that it’s mid-morning and maybe time for a snack but the world is telling me it’s high noon and time for a full mid-day meal, how is my body to make sense of this conflict other than to feel that time is getting faster?

But the truth is that time is not getting faster. Time is getting changed into fake time that doesn’t reflect reality. When it’s 5:30 a.m. according to the sun but already 7 a.m. according to DST, should we really be surprised that it’s so difficult to drag ourselves out of bed?

Again – time is not getting faster; time is getting changed, like scripture said it would. But not in my house. In my house, time is set to solar time, so no matter what time the world tells me it is, I’m always pleasantly surprised to find that it’s much earlier than I thought it was, and I still have lots of time to do whatever needs to be done.

Feels good!