It shouldn’t matter to me
anymore. I mean, it’s not as if I have to go to a job every day, working 40
hours a week, punching in and punching out. It’s not as if free time is at a
premium, like it was fifteen years ago when I was working that 40 hour work
week.
Filling my mind with all the
logical reasons why it shouldn’t matter now, however, doesn’t change a thing. I
still resent that “spring forward” advancing of the clocks we all endured early
Sunday morning. We went from 1:59am to 3:00am in sixty seconds, flat. Poor 2:00
am and the fifty-nine minutes following it never got a chance to
exist.
And I want my hour of sleep
back.
I’m always a little messed
up—more than usual, that is—when we move the clocks forward. I do recall when I
was working outside the home, how those first several days felt strange because
all of a sudden, the sun that had been beginning to rise as I drove my beloved
and I to work in the morning was gone. Of course, it was nice not to be coming
home in the dark. Still, taking that bit of sunlight from the beginning of our
day and tacking it on the end never did seem right to me.
Conversely, it was jarring how,
when we finally got that hour back, it meant the beginning of that long stretch
of both going to work and coming home in the dark. David didn’t mind that
so much, as he has always worked outside. But at one point in my working life, I
toiled away in an office with no windows. It was always a horrible few months,
feeling like we dwelled in the land of the midnight sun.
But I’m not that working person
anymore. Here I am now, living the dream, able to go for a nap whenever I need
to, and often if I just want to, and yet the disruption to my “normal”
daily cycle is still quite noticeable.
My personal belief is that this
happens—and to more people than just to me—because we’re still tied to the
rhythms of the planet. In the totality of human existence, we’ve had artificial
means of telling time for a very short period, really. We devised sundials, as a
means of helping us regulate our time fairly soon out of the gate. But even
sundials can be considered natural as they depend upon the sun. Of course, they
did have one major problem: a sundial wasn’t much use on an overcast
day.
We are still a part of nature,
whether we like to admit it or not. And as a part of nature, our bodies respond
to the natural environment, and especially the light—to regulate our circadian
rhythm—our 24 hour cycle. Those who study such things report that it generally
takes a day per hour of time change for a person to fully adjust—and this is
something that applies not only to the change to daylight savings time but to
changing time via travel. Yes, the difficulty I’ve had adjusting to the spring
change is in fact a form of jet lag.
The worst part of the process
for me happens when we don’t get all the clocks in the house moved ahead. Of
course, the computer and the box from the cable company, and our cell phones all
change without our assistance. Big Brother does that for us.
But we actually have battery
operated clocks in our house—two of them—as well as a clocks on the stove and
the microwave. This year, the clock in my office was somehow missed. So there I
was on Sunday night, thinking I was doing well, getting ready to wrap up my day,
and it was not even eleven at night yet! And then I realized the clock on the
wall—which I tend to look at more than the “clock” on the bottom right of my
computer screen—was wrong.
I was up past my bedtime, and
maybe I was more tired than I realized because then and there I came up with a
new adage all by myself.
A broken clock may be right at
least twice a day, but a clock not moved forward is forever chasing the
moment.
Love,
Morgan
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