Darkness Has Never Felt Right to Me
The days are getting shorter. Here’s the honest truth about what walking at dusk actually feels like.
Sunset today is 5:57 PM. It will be dark shortly after.
Next week, when the clocks change, it will be an hour earlier. By mid-November, darkness will come around 4:00 PM. The light is fading, and it leaves me feeling hopeless.
I need to tell you something honest: darkness has never felt right to me.
I know I’m supposed to embrace it. I know autumn and winter have their beauty. I know spiritual teachers talk about the wisdom of darkness, the gift of the void, the invitation to go inward. Intellectually, I understand all of that.
But when I walk in the early darkness or dusk, there’s a fear I can’t quite shake.
A sense of things behind trees. An awareness of sounds that feel different when I can’t see their source. The wind. The desolate color of the sky. A feeling, however irrational, of impending doom.
This isn’t just a modern inconvenience. This is something deeper.
The Ancient Terror of Darkness
I am in rural New York right now. When I write this, there are absolutely no lights outside in the darkness.
A neighbor might leave an outdoor light on occasionally, but mostly there’s nothing. I’m thankful for the motion detector that turns on some lights, because the darkness out here feels vast and absolute.
I walk in the evening sometimes, though not once it’s fully dark. Even in dusk, that in-between time when sight starts to diminish, I feel it.
An ancient human terror.
Movies and scary bedtime stories surely heighten this fear. But I wonder if it’s also connected to something older. A fear that lived in humans before electricity. Before streetlights. Before we could banish night with the flip of a switch.
When I walk at dusk in late October, I can, in a way I rarely can in our modern world, understand the fears our ancestors had of the outdoors and the unknown.
The sounds and coldness create a kind of hopelessness that few things in contemporary life allow me to access. Intellectually, I know I’m fine. I know the statistics. I know my routes. I know there’s nothing actually dangerous out there.
But it feels like ancient human terror anyway.
Walking Differently in Darkness
I walk differently in darkness than in daylight.
More slowly. More aware of what’s around me. More nervous. My attention sharpens on sounds—a branch cracking, leaves rustling, something I can’t identify. In full daylight, these sounds fade into background. In dusk, they become foreground.
When sight diminishes, other senses come forward.
The texture of the path underfoot becomes more important. The smell of decay—leaves rotting, earth turning cold. The feeling of wind on my face, colder now, cutting.
I’m more present, in a way. But not in the peaceful, grounded way that contemplative walking usually brings. I’m present because I’m on alert. This is not the romanticized version of “embracing darkness” that I’ve read about in spiritual books.
This is honest discomfort. Real unease.
I’ve learned that pretending otherwise doesn’t serve anyone.
The Truth About Seasonal Transitions
Here’s what I want you to know: you’re allowed to find this difficult.
You’re allowed to miss the light. You’re allowed to feel that ancient unease when dusk comes too early. You’re allowed to not love autumn and winter. You don’t have to romanticize the darkness or pretend it feels welcoming.
The fear you feel when dusk comes earlier, that’s not irrational.
That’s not something to overcome or transcend. That’s your body remembering what humans have always known: darkness brings uncertainty. Before electricity made night safe, darkness brought real danger.
Walking into the dark doesn’t have to feel good to be real. Admitting “darkness has never felt right to me” is more honest than any spiritual bypassing about embracing the void.
Tomorrow is Samhain eve, the threshold into the dark half of the year. I’ll share what I’m learning about adapting to this season without forcing myself to love it.
But today, I just wanted to tell the truth: the darkness is coming earlier, and it doesn’t feel right to me.
Maybe it doesn’t feel right to you either. That’s okay.
How do you actually feel about the darkness coming earlier? What’s your honest experience?
Reply and let me know. I’m walking into this season alongside you.
Walking into the dark (reluctantly),
Jeffrey
P.S. Tomorrow I’ll share what adapting to the dark half actually looks like, without the spiritual bypassing. If you’re interested in learning more about contemplative walking as spiritual practice, or about the Le Puy Camino retreat I’m leading in September 2026, subscribe to receive my weekly reflections.
I used to have the same feelings when I was much younger; it was a form of depression. As a Leo, I love the sun, but now I can't handle the heat like I used to. I've had many fabulous experiences in the mountains and desert being outside in the dark—the silence, multitudinous stars—feeling at one with the earth. Here, in town (Tucson) I don't enjoy the dark as much as I did while in wilderness.
So I'm not the only one! Actually, I never thought of myself as nervous or fearful of the dark. But I do know that for most of my adult life I've left some kind of light on in the house so I wouldn't wake to pitch dark. More noticeable this time of year is that I really hate getting up in the dark. Dawn is not a time I find charming or attractive.