To the Question of Time

Time feels obvious—until it doesn’t.

Winter landscape with night sky

We divide our days neatly into hours, minutes, and seconds. Calendars align our work, our rest, our rituals. Yet at certain moments of the year—most noticeably around the Winter Solstice—something feels subtly out of sync. The light does not behave as the clock suggests it should. Sunrise and sunset refuse to align with our expectations. The shortest day arrives, yet the timing of darkness seems strangely displaced.

This is not a mistake. It is a reminder that time, as we live it, is a negotiation between nature and human order.

The shortest day, and the confusion it creates

Astronomically, the Winter Solstice is precise. It is the moment when the Sun reaches its lowest apparent path across the sky, giving us the fewest physical minutes of daylight. This is an observable, measurable reality rooted in Earth’s axial tilt.

Yet our clocks tell a more complicated story. Around the Solstice, the earliest sunsets and the latest sunrises do not coincide with the shortest day itself. To the modern mind, trained to trust digital precision, this feels paradoxical—almost like an error in calculation.

In truth, it is a clash of two different ways of understanding time.

Earth does not move at a constant speed

The first layer of this puzzle lies in Earth’s orbit.

Earth does not travel around the Sun in a perfect circle. Its path is slightly elliptical. During part of the year, Earth is closer to the Sun—a point known as perihelion. Because of gravity, Earth moves faster along its orbit at this time. December and January are precisely when this increase in orbital speed occurs.

This matters because a “day” is not simply one full rotation of Earth on its axis. A solar day—the one we experience as noon to noon—also depends on how far Earth has moved along its orbital path.

When Earth is moving faster, it must rotate a little more for the Sun to return to the same position in the sky. This leads to a subtle but important effect.

The “extra turn” of the day

During this period, Earth’s natural solar day becomes slightly longer than 24 hours—by roughly half a minute.

This does not mean that days suddenly feel longer. Instead, it means that solar time (measured by the actual Sun) slowly drifts relative to clock time. Over weeks, those seconds accumulate, and daylight gradually slides across our fixed schedule.

This phenomenon is part of what astronomers call the equation of time—the difference between apparent solar time and mean solar time. If you plot this difference over the year, you get the elegant figure-eight curve known as the analemma, often seen on globes.

Nature is fluid. Our clocks are not.

When humanity stopped following the Sun

For most of human history, time was local and solar. Noon was when the Sun stood highest in the sky. Villages lived by light, shadow, and season.

That changed with the rise of railways, global navigation, and modern communication. Society required synchronisation. Precision became more important than locality.

So we created a new ruler for time.

Today, our clocks are governed by atomic standards rather than celestial motion. The second is defined with extraordinary exactness: 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a Cesium atom.

From this, we construct a perfectly uniform day of 86,400 seconds, regardless of what Earth is doing.

Atomic clocks are astonishingly accurate. They do not drift. They do not respond to seasons. They do not care about sunlight.

And therein lies the mismatch.

A rigid grid laid over a living planet

Earth’s rotation is not perfectly steady. It slows, speeds, and wobbles in response to gravitational interactions, internal dynamics, and orbital mechanics. Atomic time, by contrast, is rigid.

When Earth’s natural day runs slightly long—as it does around the Solstice—the entire block of daylight shifts relative to our 24-hour grid. Sunrise, sunset, and noon slide quietly across the clock face.

The result is a subtle dissonance:the shortest physical day does not feel neatly aligned with our schedules.

The clock insists on regularity. The planet insists on rhythm.

Time as a lived experience

From the perspective of AllNeiGong, this tension is not a problem to be solved, but a truth to be observed.

Nature does not operate in equal units. Growth, rest, contraction, and emergence follow cycles that breathe rather than tick. The Solstice marks an extreme—not just of light, but of stillness. It is the moment when decline completes its arc and a new movement begins, even if it is not yet visible.

Our clocks cannot show this turning. They can only measure duration.

To sense time fully, one must look beyond the grid and return to pattern:light and dark, warmth and cold, activity and rest.

The Solstice as a reminder

The Winter Solstice quietly teaches us that precision is not the same as truth.

Astronomical time tells us what is happening.Clock time tells us how we organise ourselves around it.

Both are useful. Neither is complete on its own.

When the light feels misaligned with the day, it is not nature that is confused. It is simply reminding us that time is not a machine—it is a relationship.

And the Solstice, standing at the threshold between diminishing and returning light, invites us to pause and remember that distinction.

The heavens move as they must.The clock follows rules we chose.