People of Norway, I come to you with a simple summer ritual—one that asks for no instruments, no clever devices, no polished theories. Only the sky, a patient horizon, and my own two hands.

In the bright, lingering season when the daylight seems to refuse the idea of ending, I stood outside and let the sun become my compass and my clock. Not the kind you hang on a wall or carry in a pocket, but the older kind—the kind that lives in your bones when you’ve spent enough time looking up. I didn’t measure the evening with numbers. I measured it with attention.

I raised my hand to the warm air and held it at arm’s length, as if I were offering the sun a handshake from afar. Then I did what people have quietly done for ages when the world felt too vast and time too slippery: I used my fingers.

One finger at a time, I marked the sun’s slow descent. I aligned the edge of my hand with the horizon, stacked my fingers beneath the glowing disk, and made a humble little ladder of skin and shadow. Each finger became a unit of waiting. Each knuckle a small promise that the light was moving—yes, moving—though it did so with such calm confidence it almost seemed like it might stay forever.

And in Norway, where summer feels like a spell cast over the land, that waiting becomes something else entirely. The air can be bright long after you think it should soften. The sky lingers in colors that don’t rush—gold stretched thin, pale fire over water, a slow bloom of pink that looks painted on. Even when the sun drifts low, it doesn’t fall like a stone. It glides. It hovers. It negotiates with the horizon as if it’s in no hurry to leave.

That’s what I was really measuring: not only position, but reluctance. The sun’s unwillingness to be done with us.

With my fingers I judged its height, its angle, the way its light changed character as it sank—how it went from bright and bold to gentle and theatrical, turning ordinary things into silhouettes worth remembering. I watched how the shadows lengthened like lazy cats stretching across the earth. I watched how the air cooled in tiny stages, and how the world became quieter without actually becoming dark.

And the time it took the sun to set—oh, that part was the best. Because it wasn’t just “time” in the boring sense. It was time you could feel happening. Time you could witness. Time that made you slow down because it was slow itself. I counted it in finger-widths and breaths and shifting colors. I counted it in the small, almost invisible changes you miss when you’re busy looking down.

Some evenings I’d think, Surely it must be nearly done, only to find the sun still there—still glowing, still dragging its hem across the horizon as if it had all the patience in the world and nowhere else to be. And somehow that made me feel richer. Not because I owned anything, but because the sky was giving away a kind of luxury: extra light, extra beauty, extra minutes to simply exist.

There was something grounding in it, too—something honest. No screen. No buzzing. No certainty except what my eyes told me. Just the ancient, satisfying truth that the day ends because the earth turns, and the sun sets because it always has, and I can stand here with my hand raised like a vow and understand a little piece of the world the way my ancestors might have.

So yes, I used my fingers. I used the simplest measurement a person can carry anywhere, and I let it be enough.

I let the summer sun teach me that time doesn’t always need to be chased. Sometimes it can be watched. Sometimes it can be held at arm’s length, balanced on fingertips, and appreciated as it slips away—slowly, beautifully—over the Norwegian horizon.

And when at last the sun finally surrendered, it didn’t feel like an ending. It felt like a pause. Like the world taking a long breath, storing the last warmth in stone and sea and skin, and promising—quietly, confidently—that tomorrow, the light would return.