Time for Change

Daylight Saving Time is supposed to be a good thing, right?

We chose to do this. It wasn’t always this way. And, down through history, some our our most infamous writers have chosen to write about the lost (and gained time) along the way!

There’s more to be resented about the movement of the clocks back and forth.

As Robertson Davies puts it (in The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks):

“I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen.”

I suppose this should be a time for establishing the changes in our lives that we’ve been talking about for so long. It’s “Time for Change,” as it were. But, couldn’t it be accomplished in some other way — not so fraught with the bitter and constant complaining of my own senses. There’s something overbearing in the thought that saving time will make more time to accomplish all that has accumulated on my list of things TO DO. The list just continues to grow — Daylight Saving or not…

Robertson Davies further says:

“As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the daylight saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.”

I know that time should not change how my schedule evolves. I should be inspired. I should be ready to jump out of bed in the morning, and eager to fall back in at night. Instead, there’s dread. I feel as though my time is stolen (Harry S. Truman called it “a monstrosity of timekeeping) —  that those precious moments of sleep are now turned upside down. I should think of it as something that’s more “borrowed,” soon to be returned. But the forthcoming months speed by too fast, and it become yet another headache to change again for Fall.

Winston Churchill wrote:

“An extra yawn one morning in the springtime, an extra snooze one night in the autumn is all that we ask in return for dazzling gifts. We borrow an hour one night in April; we pay it back with golden interest five months later.”

I some brief-fleeting-maddening moments, the idea of “borrowing” makes Daylight Saving Time somewhat more palatable, but my body doesn’t seem to want to cooperate. The hours until the alarm goes off suddenly are far too short, and rising (again) in the chill dark is reprehensible.

Dave Berry says:

“You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight saving time.”

At least, it makes me think of time… how fast it’s going… how the year is flying by… how I can’t believe it’s time to feel an impossible-to-explain anger at the clock for the hour that it’s displaying…

This too shall pass.

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