As Pink Floyd would say, “Time keeps slipping into the future, ticking away a dull day.” We all assume that we have plenty of time ahead especially when we are young only to look up one day and realise life has slipped by while we were waiting for something to happen- or for someone or something to show the way. Then follows the jolt of realising the clock’s been running the whole time.
Speaking of clocks, daylight saving starts this weekend. On Sunday, 27 September, the clocks go forward an hour. Instead of just waiting for 2.00am and losing that hour to sleep, make it a deliberate, conscious choice. That hour is yours – an extra hour of daylight. You’ll never get it back. What will you fill it with? Maybe gather the family at 4.00pm and have a “clock-changing ceremony” – something fun and meaningful. Call the people you’ve been meaning to call. There may come a time when you’d beg for one more hour just to tell the people in your life how much you love them.
By Sunday, time will have sprung forward. Most of your devices will have magically changed themselves – except the rebellious microwave, which demands you hold down three buttons at once, before it stubbornly resets itself to 12:00. The oven clock will hold out too. It’s been wrong for six months anyway – just leave it. The car clock you’ll get around to in a couple of months, next time you’re bored and need something to fidget with. As for the alarm clock that wakes you with shrill noises – the best fix for that one is a hammer. Everything else in the house, you’ll have to change by hand. While you’re at it, swap the batteries in the smoke alarm too.
Why we do this
Daylight saving is said to offer several benefits. The original justification was energy savings: with more daylight in the evening, people rely less on artificial lighting and heating. It’s also thought to encourage physical activity, giving people extra time after work to play sport or get outside. Crime rates may drop too, since more offenses tend to occur at night than during daylight hours. Road safety can improve, as the added evening light helps cut down on certain kinds of traffic accidents. One woman, however, wasn’t convince. She complained that the extra sunlight was fading her curtains.
What is time, really?
Salvador Dalí – his 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory is the one with the melting, droopy clocks draped over a barren landscape. It’s often read as a meditation on time being fluid and subjective rather than rigid. So what is time? As all the great masters have said, the only time you have is the present; the only time is NOW; or as Pink Floyd said , you can run over the same old ground for 10 years waiting for life to happen. That’s really what the time change exposes; how flimsy our relationship with time actually is.
