A Wrinkle in Time

Daylight saving time is here again. On the one hand, I enjoy having more sunshine hours when I get home from work at the end of the day. Still, the whole concept of it truly baffles me. Having grown up in Arizona where there is no such thing as daylight saving time, I’ve had to learn to adapt to the custom as an adult. So in some respects, I’m like a person who learned English as a second language as an adult – no matter how fluent I get I still have to translate in my head and will always have an accent. It just plain feels foreign to me. I mean really, who ever started this thing anyway? Was it politicians or golf course owners who got together and said “hey, here’s a groovy idea, let’s change what time it is!”

I was completely taken aback when I did a little research on the topic and learned that “the idea of daylight saving was first conceived by Benjamin Franklin during his sojourn as an American delegate in Paris in 1784, in an essay, ‘An Economical Project.’ Read more about Franklin's essay.” I also did not know that the practice of changing clocks twice a year takes place in several countries. So, it’s not just some crazy American notion to increase recreation and save electricity.

Its really pretty ludicrous that I balk at changing from “real” time to “false” time. Cutting up the flow of moments into 60 second minutes and 60 minute hours is completely arbitrary to begin with.

In pondering the whole notion of time it occurs to me that while we may use the expression of “saving time”, there really is no way to bank moments of our lives. We have the same 24 hrs in each day that was allocated to Christopher Columbus, St. Barsanuphius, Michelangelo, Madame Curie, Frank Zappa, Florence Nightingale, Jack the Ripper, or Coco the Clown. How we each choose to spend that time is up to us. Whether it is in light or dark, we each choose moment by moment what meaning we give to the minutes we get. We choose whether we will spend it in “quiet desperation” or mundane pursuit, whether we will search for spiritual growth or squander it in hedonistic revelry.

Sometimes I feel altogether too much like those hamsters you see going round and round and round in that little exercise circle, being awfully darned busy but not really getting anywhere.

Every now and then I will find some cash I’ve left in a pocket or a book or a drawer and think to myself BONUS and then go out to spend. But I’ve never opened a drawer and found that spare half hour I’d tucked away for later. Sure, sometimes my schedule may free up some time from one expected obligation or another to give me increased choices of how I will spend my minutes, giving the illusion of some “found” time. But I only get what I get. There is no more hiding around the corner. Unlike videogames and pinball, no matter how many points I wrack up, I don’t get another go.
So I’m thinking about my time and how I’m spending it. I’m thinking it is high time that I started making some new choices to make my days more by design and less by default. But, for now, I think I’ll go curl up with the book “Einstein’s Dreams” by Alan Lightman and lose myself in notions of the fluidity of time for a while…..