What time is it?

I woke up this morning with no idea what time it was.

Seven? Eight? I knew the clocks had changed overnight but in that half-awake moment I couldn't get my bearings. Something had shifted while I was sleeping. I lay there for a few seconds, genuinely disoriented, not quite in yesterday, not yet properly in today.

It passed quickly. I looked at the clock, the day reoriented itself, and I got up.

But that brief moment of not knowing where I was in time reminded me of how we can be in life at times. Not just what time it is. But what chapter it is. Not the chapter behind us, and not the one we're anxiously mapping ahead. This one. The chapter we're actually in, right now, today.

A life moves through seasons. Not always neatly, not on any schedule you get to approve in advance, but it moves.

There are chapters that arrive quietly, a gradual settling into something, a slow brightening you don't notice until you look back. And there are chapters that arrive without warning, the ones that rewrite everything overnight and leave you standing in a story you didn't choose.

Some seasons are dark. Genuinely, heavily dark. The kind where the weight of it is physical, where getting through the day is its own achievement, where the idea that things might feel different one day seems not just unlikely but almost offensive. Those chapters are real. They deserve to be named as what they are.

And some seasons are light. Easier. Fuller. The kind where things are really good. Where the people you love are well, the work is meaningful, the evenings are long, warm and unhurried.

What's interesting is how poorly we tend to inhabit both.

You see in the dark chapters, we lose ourselves. We read them as permanent, as though this is simply who we are now and how things will always be. The difficult chapter stops feeling like a chapter and starts feeling like the whole book.

And in the light chapters, we can easily race through them. Some of us will feel anxious about what comes next, already half-managing the future, already slightly braced for the good to end. We live in the lighter seasons as if we're only visiting.

Either way, we're not quite there. Not quite in the chapter we're actually in.

I've had the privilege of sitting with many families in their darkest moments. And in those moments, we opened the book of their loved ones, we flicked through the chapters of their lives in order to create a fitting eulogy for them.

In doing so, I have heard whole lives. The full arc of them, chapter by chapter, season by season. And what strikes me, again and again, is how a life looks different when you read all of it rather than just the loudest parts of it.

What those lives have shown me, is that every story moved through seasons. Darker chapters and lighter ones. Chapters chosen and chapters that simply arrived.

Which brings me back to this morning. To this chapter. To the question of whether we're actually in it.

Reading your story properly doesn't mean endlessly excavating the past or anxiously charting the future. It means developing a clearer sense of where you actually are today.

What season is this, honestly? What does this chapter ask of you? What is it offering that you might be too distracted by what was, or by what might be, to actually receive?

The clocks went forward last night. The light is back. Not because we earned it, not because the hard winter deserved to end, but because the season turned. It does, eventually, always turn.

If you're in a dark chapter right now, that matters. Name it. Don't rush past it or dress it up as something easier than it is. Dark chapters have things to tell you, if you can read them without being consumed by them.

And if you're in a lighter chapter, if things are really good right now, then be here. Actually be here. Let it count. Let yourself be shaped by the light as much as you've been shaped by the dark.

This morning I eventually worked out what time it was. And now I have the job of changing all the clocks in the house, although I might just leave them as they are, to save me changing them again later in the year.

But once I knew what time it was, everything settled. The day made sense. I could see it for what it actually was, not yesterday's version, not tomorrow's worry, but today. Sunday morning. Clocks forward. Light already here.

Go and enjoy the day, this day.

And while you're in it, take a moment to ask yourself, what chapter are you in right now?