Happy Daylight Saving Time. Once again we get to enjoy one of those magical moments when Time stands still for an hour. Go to bed on October 29 and wake up on October 30 an hour younger. Pretty cool. I'll bet fitting into those jeans I struggled into last week will be no problem now. The problem is, next Spring they take this instant of youth away from me and I end up the same as I ever was. And each time we screw with the clock, it takes me 3 weeks to convince my body to go along. For 6 weeks a year I have to struggle to line up the bio rythmns of my life just so we can save something that wasn't in trouble in the first place.
I won't get into whether Time even exists or not. I am comfortable with the fact that Time does exist because we say it does. Okay now. That potential pit of philosophical debate is closed. So what and where does that leave us? It leaves us with an intangible concept without which dentist appointments would be missed, production schedules would always be met, and I would never be late again. In my world of always being a a day late and a dollar short, no Time would be a good time. For me anyway. My wife on the other hand, would go bonkers. She lives to keep a schedule.
My major bitch about Time and how we set it up is the number of hours in a day. They did not give us enough of them. This yearly rebate of one hour hardly makes up for that oversight. Especially in light of the fact that 6 months from now, they will take it away again. 24 hours is just not enough time to get through a full day here in Maine. 30 hours would have been a smarter choice. Sleep for 8, work for 8, and then you still have 14 left for personal use.
Metric Time on the other hand is way too crazy. First of of all, they want to cut back the day to 10 hours. Noon becomes 5 o'clock and an hour drags like you would not believe. A benefit might be that for those of us who have too much time on our hands, our problem is quickly solved. Anyone ought to be able to handle 10 hours a day. Especially when you consider that at least 3 of them are spent with mouth open in a mindless REM wonderland where Time stands still.
So here we are in the "Fall Back" mode. The government would like to convince us they are responsible for adding another hour of daylight to our day. Nothing unusual in that. The government is always taking credit for percieved good deeds whether they deserve the credit or not. Considering that they are trying to give us something that is not theirs to give, I find it funny we swallow this gambit so completely.
They say Time brings order and predictabilty to our lives. Hmm. I'll go along with the order thing, but we already have predictability. We already know that the Sun will come up everyday. We know that at some point, we will die. What else do we really need to predict? What else do we really need to keep track of? Unfortunately, our world has become accustomed and dependent on this artificial breakdown of our lifespan on this planet.
"Time is Money". "Time is on our side". "No Time like the present". Cute and catchy phrases point to our obsession with time. By far my favorite is "No time to lose". The phrase is supposed to point out that something is in need of immediate attention. However, if you take the words literally, then no truer words have been written. Since Time does not exist outside of our minds, how can we lose it? "Losing our minds" makes more sense.
I re-read the previous words. I am struck by how dependent I am on the concept of time. Finding words that do not lead or point to it's passage or impact was harder than I thought. I guess it's time to admit that I am a slave to the ticking clock. So I will follow the government directive and be the good citizen. I will turn the clocks back and live in the past for the next 6 months.
