Saving Time
It’s the last day of September and I’m feeling kind of melancholy. Summer has slipped away and the first sullen days of Fall have arrived. Previously living in the desert, I’d always welcomed Fall for a long-awaited respite from the heat. Now, living in the mountains Fall represents shorter days that will quickly turn to winter, or what feels like winter, even if the calendar doesn’t note it yet.
Today I feel painfully aware how much of the year has slipped by. Did I accomplish anything of meaning this year? There are only three months left of 2021! Maybe the calendar shouldn’t be so important in defining a month’s content, though. Why should January get all the resolutions and September get the regrets?
The whole concept of time and its passage seems strange. For example, in just a few weeks millions of Americans including me will set our clocks back an hour as we return from daylight savings time to standard time. Isn’t that one heck of a concept - that all of us U.S. folks save Hawaii, Arizona and the Navaho Nation would somehow just agree to move our time measurement devices backward. Reminds me of when I used to balance a checkbook each month. Sometimes I would find myself a dollar or so off and in frustration I would simply enter, “error occurred here” and I would add the dollar or subtract as necessary to make myself even with the bank. That didn’t make my numbers “true” but it satisfied me for the moment.
So what about moving “time” about arbitrarily. Sometimes I lose a whole day. You know how it goes – you show up a day early for an appointment because all day you’ve had it in your head it was Tuesday and not Wednesday? So where did Tuesday go?
When we move the clocks back to 1:00 am instead of 2:00 am – we have to relive that hour. It’s weirdly like that old movie, Groundhog Day. And I pity the person working a graveyard shift – sorry buddy, you’ve got to do over that hour you just spent at work. We will settle in though, at least after a few days or weeks. We’ll adjust. Our dogs and cats will adjust to a new feeding schedule and we’ll get used to it being dark early in the evening. Then when we’re good and used to things, come March 14 we’re told we’re to “lose an hour”. Lose an hour - you can do that? Where did it go? Oh ya, we must a borrowed that hour back in November. As strange as this process is, and notwithstanding various states trying to rid themselves of daylight savings time, we all buy into the time changes twice a year. And nobody stands around arguing over it, saying they’re a purist and they operate on “real time”. We all just function within our new construct of reality.
So I’m wondering, if something as big as what time is can be changed with a stroke of pen (an adopted rule) and mass obedience, what else could we agree upon to change and by our belief and support make a new reality? For example, would most Americans like peace with their neighbors? What if we were to spring forward like in daylight savings time, but spring forward to a time where hatred and greed are no more, where racism has no place, and we love one another like we did when we were children and innocent of harm. And as for falling back – how about falling back to a time when we built things to last, conserved resources and shared with one another? Why don’t we just agree that when savings time starts and ends, we’ll start something new for humanity? If time can be changed to suit our whim, the sky’s the limit as to what else we can do.
Miriam Shanks 9/30/2021
