Hickory Dickory

Time is constantly proving its irrelevance. Our lives are dictated by it, but it is a trickster, an illusionist given license to run the modern world—and aren’t we the fools for giving it such power?

Time is unstable. Unreliable. It makes us chase it, then drags its heels like a petulant toddler. It is easily lost when we’re deep in our bliss and rudely intrusive when a workday dawns. We panic when we’re late and bored when we’re early. We eat “because it’s time”, go to bed “because it’s time”, and if we don’t, if we heed our natural rhythm by eating when we’re hungry and sleeping when we’re tired, we mess up the clock and confuse our own bodies into the bargain.

Even the calendar is evil because a child should be born when it’s ready, not pulled from the womb because it’s “overdue”. “Overdue” simply means that predicting a birth date is like predicting the weather: not an exact science. Pity the babes born by appointment. Their first experience in this life is to be roused before they’re ready.

And daylight savings time? Please. Critters and crops have no idea what time it is, and less reason to care, so the old story about it benefiting the farmers is meaningless. As for saving energy by giving us an extra hour of daylight, hello? Light earlier in the morning means dark earlier in the evening and, seriously, summer days are by nature longer than winter days, so why bother when people are more disoriented and accident-prone in the week following a time change than by the usual mix of sleep deprivation and prescription medication?

If I sound crabby—and I believe I do—DST ended last night and my already hormonally-challenged biochemistry has been knocked further out of whack as a result. It will take a week for my system to adapt. I try to accept change because I can’t, well, change it, but I appreciate it more when the change makes sense.

Daylight savings no longer does.