I can’t speak for all early risers, of course, but for me the absolute worst thing about this useless tradition of switching to Daylight Saving Time is the loss of morning light. I’m in favor of keeping DST all the time, as the US Senate has voted to do. The only reason this is still an issue is to give the House yet something else to fight about. How dysfunctional are we, really? This one’s a no brainer! Look, I start work early every day. I jog before work because I’m too tired afterward. In late February to early March I can get out and back before seven. (In the summer before six!) Then DST happens. I’m plunged into another month of waiting until seven to be able to jog. DST is just one of those ridiculous things we just keep doing because we don’t have the will to change it. We’d rather fight.
I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. How we think of it, how we divide it. We sometimes lose sight of the larger picture. If relativity is right, the stars we see at night are, many of them, long gone. We’re seeing light trudging through the near vacuum of space, or maybe dark matter, and thinking how we’ve got to get to our meeting on time. How we need to be at work from 9-2-5. How somebody with money owns that portion of our time. There’s a reason that DST starts on a weekend. Time. We can’t grasp it but we can waste it. What are we waiting for? Some of us are seeking the truth. Even so we know that Morpheus was right—time is always against us. It’s a limited commodity, but even that language cheapens it.
Those of us of a philosophical bent allow ourselves time to ponder such things. We call time a dimension, but what does that really mean? Theoretically it can be traveled along in either direction (again, pending relativity) but we only experience it in one. So what do we do? We interrupt its flow because during a war during the last century it was deemed that industry could be more productive if it were light an hour later. Maybe we should just all agree to shift our perception of time ahead by an hour permanently. That’s forward thinking. And who knows, it might just save us all a lot of time.
