How to Time Travel
This morning, I woke up naturally and peacefully. There was a stillness in the room that I couldn’t place at first. The light outside looked softer somehow, as if the sky hadn't yet remembered what time it was. The clock said one time, but my body insisted it was different.
Then I realized that the clocks had changed. Daylight Savings.
That small, strange ritual of shifting time forward or back. I had gained an hour this time.
The thought made me smile. It was like waking up and finding a twenty-dollar bill in a coat pocket I hadn’t worn since last winter. A feeling of having received something, even though nothing really changed. Time, it seemed, had slipped me a gift.
And almost just as quickly, came the next thought: What should I do with it?
Like most gifts, it came with a subtle pressure to use it well. An extra hour. It could mean catching up on sleep. Replying to texts I’ve let linger too long. Folding that laundry in the corner. Reading that article I've had open in a tab for three days.
It was revealing, this impulse to fill the time, to catch up. To not let the hour go to waste.
That urgency exposed something: a quiet belief that I’m behind. Not just today, but in general. Always catching up. Always returning to undone tasks and unopened intentions, to versions of myself lingering in the past, requesting attention.
Time so easily becomes something to manage, to optimize, to spend carefully. It becomes a kind of currency: traded, stored, budgeted. There are entire industries, philosophies, even identities built on “time management.”
But I've started to notice that some of the richest moments in my life are the ones I didn’t try to manage at all. Sitting with my partner on the couch, saying nothing. Stirring a pot on the stove, lost in the rhythm. Watching the sky turn gold, then violet, then blue.
Time seems to stretch in those moments. Maybe not stretch, exactly. Maybe it just stops being measured. And when it stops being measured, it starts being felt.
That’s what mindfulness has offered for me. Not more hours in the day, but a softer relationship to them. The sense that time isn’t only about what I do in it, but how I meet it.
Sometimes I meet time by rushing through it. Other times, time seems to meet me, when I'm still enough to notice.
This morning presented a small but clear choice: I could spend the hour catching up on what I missed or invite something new into this space I’d suddenly found.
That felt luxurious. Less because of what I’d do, and more because of the awareness itself. To hold time not just as a ticking clock, but as an open hand.
It struck me, lying there, not yet committed to the day ahead, that I hadn’t gained an hour, I had simply noticed one.
And maybe that’s all that’s ever happening. Time is neither gained nor lost, saved nor spent. It’s just here, waiting to be noticed.
Next year, when the clocks fall back again, I hope I remember this feeling. That I don’t need more time. I just need fewer reasons to leave the time I already have.
And that is how I learned to time travel.
