How wondrous it feels, after a winter of dark skies, to see dawn beginning to break even before I crawl onto the bus in the morning. Almost pagan in my desire for the longer days, I anticipate this every year after standing in the dark since October. Then everything changes. Darkness falls again. I’m inexplicably weary, despite the sleep of a weekend. It’s Daylight Saving Time. Every year I wonder at this inane wartime madness that we keep going, despite its lack of applicability in an electronic age. Employers, I should think, with an eye toward efficiency, would lead the charge to end changing clocks twice a year to yawning employees and the inevitable depression of taking a step back into darkness. It will be another month before the sun again appears at my bus stop. Meanwhile, it will be light when I’m getting ready for bed in the evening. Perhaps I’m the only one who thinks about this. Religion, however, has always held time sacred.
Quite apart from “sacred time”—holidays and festivals—religions have always been about the appropriate use of time. Counterintuitively, they suggest the rushing about we do to make money, to ensure our material well-being, might be misplaced. There might be a better use of the allotment that we’re given on this earth. Time to ponder. Call it prayer or meditation, studies show that it is good for us to spare some of our time for quiet reflection. Every second counts. And time sets the very patterns of our lives. Bodies know when to awake and when to eat. Until we go and shift the entire calendar on them.
Daylight Saving Time was a wartime measure to ensure the most efficient production of arms. Now, in days with lights blazing constantly, telecommuting, and farming being done largely by automation, we still religiously keep to this barbaric ritual. Eyes heavy with sleep, I stand in the utter darkness again, wondering when I might see some glimmer of light. It will only come when I’m ensconced in my windowless cubicle. It is so dispiriting. I, for one, would gladly forfeit a mere extra hour’s sleep in the autumn, just to keep progress going in the spring. Instead, I follow the crowd as we waste an hour that becomes five, six, ten, or twenty as we try to readjust our bodies to rising an hour earlier. For those of us up before four a.m., it is a sacrifice indeed. All I really crave is to allow the light continue to grow.