Losing Time: What Moving to the Pacific Northwest Taught Me About Living by My Own Clock

I'm Anne Peterson, founder of iLumn8.Life — a curated marketplace and learning hub for safe, ethical personal and professional development — and the author of Is This A Cult? (Difference Press, 2024). This summer I learned something I didn't expect to: how much of my life had been run by clocks that weren't mine to begin with.

Don't worry, I'm not about to blame this on too many tabs open in my brain — that's a whole different article. I'm talking about a pretty recent shift in how I relate to time, and honestly, the fabulous impact it's having.

This summer marked a HUGE change in my life — we sold our home in Plano, Texas, and made the big move up to the South Puget Sound (Seattle-Tacoma area). I officially landed here at the end of May. Somewhere between suburban dreamland (IYKYK) and a couple of campers in the woods by the water, I seem to have lost all sense of time.

I barely know what day of the week it is. Forget "scheduling everything there is to do and handle" — a trope I was steeped in for years as a performance trainer. Instead, my rhythm has been completely remade by the sunrise (5:30am) and sunset (9pm), by the chirping birds and squawking eagles who live next door. The dappled light through the trees, the mist over Case Inlet, whether or not "the Mountain is out" — that's PNW-speak for whether Mt. Tahoma (Rainier, to the rest of us) is visible on the horizon. These are the things that mark time now.

I can't sit behind a computer more than two hours. I think maybe this is how it was in the before times — before days got carved into 15-minute blocks in six different colors, before the constant dings and rings and beeps pushed us from one thing to the next.

These days I work when the inspiration is flowing and stop when my body says stop. The heat tells me when it's yard-work time versus computer time. I'm working in projects instead of blocks of time. I've set my scheduler program to never allow more than two appointments a day, and only four days a week. Most impactful, I'm taking WAY more time off — mostly Tuesdays and Wednesdays, my husband's days off. Two days off in the middle of the week, SACRILEGE!

The wild part? I feel more productive than I have in years. I used to end every day with the sense that no matter how many hours I worked, there was always more undone — I was ALWAYS behind. All the productivity tips and tricks in the world mostly just left me overwhelmed and exhausted.

All of this got me curious about our whole relationship to time. Turns out it's a long and complicated story.

We didn't always live by the 24-hour day — it got stitched together over thousands of years by a handful of very different civilizations, mostly for reasons that had nothing to do with how any of us actually feel day to day. The Egyptians split daylight and night into 12 parts each, tracking it by starlight, though their "hours" stretched and shrank with the seasons.

The Babylonians gave us 60 minutes and 60 seconds, because their number system loved dividing by 60. A Greek astronomer eventually suggested making all the hours equal length — mostly so he could track stars more precisely, not so anyone could get to work on time.

Equal hours didn't become the norm for ordinary people until mechanical clocks showed up in medieval Europe. And the tidy time zones we take for granted? Those came from 1800s railroads needing every town's clock to agree — before that, noon just happened whenever the sun said it did, town by town.

I should say — this is the Euro-Western history of time. I'm sitting on Coast Salish land as I write this, and I know there's an entirely different relationship to time here, one built around tides and salmon runs and season rather than a grid of numbered hours. I don't know that history well enough yet to tell it properly, but it's important to me to name that it exists, and that ours isn't the only way humans have ever kept time.

So maybe the question isn't "how do I get more organized." Maybe it's something more like — whose clock have I actually been living by?

This is exactly why iLumn8 exists. We built this platform on the belief that growth is a lifelong practice, not a destination. No course, retreat, or workshop finishes the work for you — that's the part that keeps happening after you leave the room. Sometimes the real work is just staying curious, staying open to a different perspective, and letting the patterns of your own life teach you what you're ready to practice next. Life itself is the best campus we've got. That's the kind of learning we care about here.

There is a permission slip I think a lot of us need — maybe most of us: you ARE allowed to find your own way of living inside all there is to do. We've spent so long adding one more thing to the plate, telling ourselves we have to do it all and squeeze it all into the blocks we're handed. What I'm discovering, slowly, is that some things just... wait. They wait until the rhythm says it's their time. And so far, the world hasn't ended.

What's been setting your rhythm lately — the sunrise, or the schedule? We'd love to hear from you in the comments. And if you'd rather have conversations like this one land straight in your inbox, that's exactly what the i8 Weekly is for.