Just a day or so ago I was rising from my slumbers before the sun rose over the horizon. I was filled with energy, accomplishing multiple tasks before anyone else in my home awoke from their slumbers. By way of Facebook I learned who were my fellow early morning compadres. We’d be communicating and planning out the course of our days with enthusiasm. All it took to deflate my work ethic was the semi-annual demand that we all artificially change our clocks by moving the time one hour ahead of where it might otherwise have been. In that one stroke of the clock I felt like a jet-lagged tourist attempting to get back into the swing of things after a glorious trip abroad. My brain was confused and so were the dogs I was watching when we arose in what the clocks announced was an hour later than usual. I was sluggish for the rest of the day and I resented losing that hour to some unknown corner of the universe.
I’ve been grinching about the twice a year time change for as long as I can remember. It has never made sense to me to artificially disrupt our inner clocks over and over again. Statistics show that more people will be racing to emergency rooms on these days, often with heart attacks and other serious medical problems. There will be more wrecks and no doubt more misunderstandings between grouchy people whose bodies tell them that something is just not right. As a confirmed believer in routine adherence to daily practices I know that I will be out of sorts for several weeks before my body readjusts to the new timing of everything and I won’t be in peak condition until that happens.
I suspect that if we had a national vote tomorrow the majority would want to pick one way of timing things and then staying there forevermore. Most seem to like Daylight Savings Time but I don’t care one way or another as long as I don’t have to shift gears again in the fall. Just choose one already and leave us all alone. This is a torture that is totally unnecessary. It was only invented during a time of war to provide more daylight for manufacturing. It does not give more sunshine for growing things. That is a matter of nature. There are the same hours of light and dark no matter which system we use, so I say that we should stop pretending that the rotation of timing is somehow imperative for our national good.
I tend to prefer standard time for the sake of our children. I awaken in the fall and winter to the sound of the school bus arriving on the corner of my street. It comes at 6:30 just as the first light of day is illuminating the area. When we change to Daylight Savings Time the children are standing in the dark at 6:30 and it will be almost an hour before the sun begins to shine. I find it disturbing and unnatural to ask children to arise before dawn and then catch a bus in the dark. Some how the standard timing feels more conducive to meeting their needs, but it we must insist on having more sunshine at the end of the day rather than at the beginning then let’s go for it and get our bodies permanently in sync with it. Just stop the biannual insanity.
I know that I always whine about have to change all of my clocks back and forth. It is a task that annoys me because it should be unnecessary. I gripe due to my brain rebelling and making me cranky because it is unsure of why I am changing my habits. My heartburn surges on the days of time shifts and everything about me feels sluggish. I know that I am not alone because I hear the complaints of others and I see the dip in energy on the faces of the people that I encounter. At least schools have learned to schedule spring breaks to coincide with the changing of time. Otherwise teachers would be faced with classrooms full of listless students slumped on their desks trying to regain that stolen hour of sleep that comes each spring.
I know that there are worse things to worry about. I should be chastised for spending time on an issue that doesn’t seem to matter as much as the real horrors in the world, but it seems to me that the very reason for ridding ourselves of this inane occurrence is that it does not make any kind of positive difference. If we simply decided to never change our clocks again I doubt that anyone would have cause to complain. Winter would have its shorter days and summer would bring us more sunshine regardless of what are clocks are telling us. We would all be perfectly adjusted to whatever became the standard for telling time and might even become more creative in tackling the real problems that face us all.
I don’t know what we have to do to send a message to the powers that be that we don’t like this silly process of flipping and flopping between ways of telling time. Surely those who decide such things feel the same frustrations that we do. So why is this something that we keep alive even as most of us hate it? For some reason we humans have a tendency to try something out and then keep it forever even when it obviously does not work well for us. We simply need to admit that this practice has no reason to exist anymore and then dump it without regret.
Spring is a busy time for me so I am hoping to find my mojo again before the end of this week. I wish everyone luck in adapting to the insanity of it all. As for me I’ll just allow myself a day or two of being a slug and hiding in my shell until my brain and the pups I am watching all figure out what time it really is. Tomorrow will be another day and hopefully it will feel more normal.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 