Every day for the past week my internal clock has opened my eyes at about 4:30 am. It’s driving me crazy. The alarm is set for 5:35, but my internal clock doesn’t know how to read the clock on the nightstand, it knows a whole different method of telling time.
As a traveler, I am used to adjusting my clock. I move from time zone to time zone with relative ease. But the changeover from standard time to daylight saving time has always given me fits.
Why is it so easy to wake up an hour later in Dallas or three hours later in LA after just a day, but I can’t seem to convince my internal clock to reset at home? Oddly, the things that make it easy to adjust are the same whether you’re facing a time change or a time ZONE change – people around you are doing all the things they are supposed to do at the appropriate times. The work day and subsequent meetings start at the right times. Meals are served at the right time of day. The sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening.
I can’t seem to figure it out. That leads to frustration. I’m a solver. I want to fix this problem. ARGH!
That leads me to ask the question I am seeing more and more in the media: What is the point of Daylight Saving Time? Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely understand why it was put in place. In fact, the idea of resetting the clock to accommodate daylight dates back to the Romans. The problem, as I see it, is that all the reasons it was adopted have gone the way of steam engines and covered wagons. There was no widespread electricity even a hundred years ago. Now, whether it’s in the pre-dawn darkness of morning or the post-twilight evenings, when it’s dark we just flip on a light.
During the energy crisis, someone suggested that daylight saving time would conserve energy by requiring fewer lights. That was never true in my house, where the day-to-day activities stayed the same. We just used the lights more in the evening than in the morning after resetting all the clocks.
So I am left wondering, “what is the point?” as I lay awake at 4:30 in the morning. Maybe I should write to my Congressmen (they are all three men) and suggest we do away with this ridiculous event. After all, not everyone moves the hands on their clocks. In Argentina, Chile, Iceland, Singapore, Uzbekistan and Belarus, there is no time change. In Hawaii and Arizona, the hands on the clocks don’t move twice a year. Nor do they observe DST in five American territories.
It might be time to do something about time. Time, after all, is what we make of it not what a clock tells us it is.
© The World A to Z, LLC 2015
The World A to Z 