Daylight saving time started again today.
Regardless of its original intent, I think it has become little more than an exercise in altering circadian rhythms, giving people similar mindless tasks, and a means to control the inevitable. There's always the requisite confusion as darkness overtakes rush hour and the systematic timepiece adjustment, but what it comes down to is attempting to harness the biggest pendulum of them all.
We are owned by the clock, yet we fight it with our down to the minute news, our express checkout, our fast lane, our to-go everything, our packages hitting their destination at breakneck speeds, our high speed internet, and all the rest. Being able to move that minute hand gives us great power. It's as if we briefly time travel during this paradoxical sliver of time. In the spring an hour goes forever un-lived and in the fall we have our own sixty minute version of "Groundhog Day".
When I was in grade school I would set my alarm clock a number of minutes ahead in an attempt to psych myself out. If I gave away all of those minutes I wouldn't risk riding my bike onto school grounds after the patrols had departed for class and after the pledge had already been regurgitated. This fuzzy logic never really worked, so I continued to arrive late to school for years to come. These days I try to live by my own rhythms, frequently away from the time clock and nonchalant toward a sleeping schedule, but a clock is always ticking nearby and a life will always be measured in time.
I vote that we go towards Roman time. Hours are measured by the total amount of sunlight, not a static, abstract concept. Each day had 12 hours, but they were shorter in the winter (each "hour" was more like 45 minutes) and longer in the summer.
ReplyDeleteHear, here!
...I also read that we didn't really become a time-obsessed culture until the railroads were built, and they needed some sort of standard system to coordinate across the country.
T: Roman time, eh? I don't think I fully understand how that would work, but it sounds interesting. I think TV has co-opted it with forty-five minutes of programming to every hour of TV. It's as if we know the way we jot time is wasteful and to be used for filler.
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