THE STORY

Before We Counted Hours

There was a time I planned my days
by watching others live.
I borrowed routines, rules and ways,
and all the advice they’d give.

Wake up at five.
Be productive by eight.
Eat at twelve.
Don’t sleep too late.

A morning routine, an evening reset,
a list for everything.
And every season, the very same clock
would tell me when to begin.

I thought a better life was found
in someone else’s day.
So I followed hours made by hands,
and slowly lost my way.

But long before we numbered time,
before the clock could say
that sixty minutes made an hour
and twenty-four a day,

the morning still knew when to rise,
the evening when to close.
The sun would travel through the sky,
and every body knows.

No winter sunset asked the clock
if five was far too soon.
No summer morning hurried dawn
to fit somebody’s routine.

The light grew long.
The light grew short.
The seasons changed their pace.
And somehow every changing day
still knew its proper place.

So I began to watch again,
not people, but the sky.
To notice what arrived with light
and what left when it passed by.

I learned the morning was not simply
the hours before noon.
And night was never leftover day
beneath a darker moon.

There was dawn,
when the world was still,
before its noise began.
There was morning, made for waking,
light gently telling the body, begin.

There was noon, when light stood high,
and movement filled the day.
Afternoon, when energy softened
and slowly changed its way.

Then evening came, not as an ending,
nor hours left to spend,
but as a quiet turning point
where daylight learned to bend.

And when the sun slipped out of sight,
the body shifted too.
The night was doing what the night
was always made to do.

I started seeing time as rhythm,
not boxes in a row.
Each part of day was doing something
I had never stopped to know.

And summer did not ask of me
what winter asked me to.
For sunrise changed,
and sunset changed,
and so my rhythm could change too.

The shift was never overnight,
no sudden race to keep.
A minute earlier came the dark,
a minute later came my sleep.

And somewhere in those little shifts,
my days began to mend.
I stopped demanding every season
live the same from end to end.

I still have clocks upon my walls.
I still have places to be.
But time no longer starts with numbers
when I decide how I should live.

For clocks can tell me what time it is,
but the sky taught me something else:

there is a time to rise,
a time to move,
a time to slow,
a time to restore.

And perhaps before we needed
another routine to follow through,

we needed only to remember
the rhythm god already drew.