And you can choose just who you are
Someone that you've never seen
Somewhere you've never been
You're living in a time machine"
Black Sabbath-"Time Machine"
On Saturday night going into Sunday morning, the yearly ritual of Daylight Savings Time came upon us again. Every year, once a year, one hour of time is eaten by the Langoliers and we never see it again. It makes you wonder if the powers that be are Stephen King fans. For at least two days after that, even people who have never stepped foot onto a plane learn what it is like to feel jetlag. I wonder if scientists have ever researched how much productivity is lost by our nation's workforce in the first couple days after the clocks move forward. Personally, yesterday I felt very jetlagged and just could not be productive. I was also irritable, and thanking God I didn't take that irritability out on anyone else.
One year, in the days before Andrea and I became parents, some friends and us stayed up to see what happens at Daylight Savings Time. Yes, we weren't strangers to late evenings like any other young adult with no children, but this was the first time I wanted to see the clock change on DST. This was before smartphones and clocks that changed automatically, so there was only two ways to see when the time changed and what happened: either stare at your computer clock or watch the Weather Channel. We didn't just binge watch the Weather Channel that night...we watched movies and/or played video games, but at around 1:58 AM we set the TV to the Weather Channel, and at 1:59.59, the clock jumped straight to 3:00. One whole hour...gone, never to return. It made us become philosophical.
Think about it, that is one hour that we lose once a year. 60 minutes. 3,600 seconds. I know, I hear you saying "We get the hour back in November, you moron!" No shit. In other news, water is wet. Just go with me here and in the words of the legendary Louis Armstrong, don't fuck with my hustle.
This makes me think of all the time we waste, that one hour lost due to giving us more daylight after we get home from school or work. Yes, I love the fact that it is not dark when we get home once Daylight Savings Time kicks in, but is it really worth the lost hour of sleep and all of the lost productivity while our bodies readjust? I used to think it was, but now I am thinking it would be better if we just let time increase due to our orbit around the sun, like we did for thousands of years, until we decided to cut off the top of the blanket and stick it on the bottom just to claim we have a longer blanket. Only the government, in its lack of infinite wisdom could come up with an idea so silly. Maybe Arizona has it right all along.
Man did not used to live like this. We woke up when we were no longer tired. We ate whenever we could hunt down a saber-toothed tiger for meat. Time did not dictate our lives, we did. We did what we felt like doing when we felt like doing it, just because we could. We weren't held down by schedules or deadlines. Time did play a role because we would follow the movement of the sun across the sky, but we weren't punished for not doing something when the sun was a certain point above us. Our instincts and our rumbling stomachs were probably our biggest masters at that point in history.
At some point in time, man decided time should be measured using either monoliths or sundials or clepsydras. Once time could become measured properly, it would cause our lives to be more productive and more could be done during the day. Appointments could be set, as Maximus could decide to meet Phillipus at the local chariot races taking place that afternoon, or go to the temple to offer sacrifice to Zeus. With that innovation, the perils of possibly being late for your planned event came into being. Welcome to the world, stress!
Time became even more of a dictator when gainful employment was introduced by man. When Og hired Grog to help him skin a mastodon for the evening meal, that eventually became the dog eat dog 9 to 5 world that we all live and drives us to drinking, therapy, and cancer. Time is God and money is its lord and savior. We have to break our backs day in and day out just to survive, because all of the necessities of life cost money, and also we want to keep up with the family down the street who has the bigger house and the better car. Gotta work harder to earn more money, and you have to get to work on time and punch that clock, or wages are lost and jobs are terminated. We stress over our budgets and we fight with our spouses due to the strain of work and the breakneck pace that life commands, because we have to make enough to pay off the bills. They say most marital disputes are due to finances, and that is the stone cold truth. It all goes back to that ticking clock hanging on the wall, like a sword of Damocles with numbers and hands. Get to work on time, make that money, buy that car, pay those bills! Work! Work! Work!
Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson once mused that time moved more slowly in the 1980s. He might have only been making a joke, but he has a point. How did we used to pass the time when we were growing up? We played with our friends outside. We played baseball, football, played tag, made tree forts, went exploring all over God's creation, and we still made it home in time for dinner. When you don't have a clock ruling your life, you don't have a care in the world and the stresses of daily life that plagued adults did not plague us as children. Fast forward 30 years. What do we do most of the time now? Stare at our smart phones, ignoring the outside world, trying to escape, but we become more and more enslaved by time. I'm guilty of this myself because those gadgets are an amazing blessing, to bring the world to your fingertips. Amazing. What is also a blessing is also a damnable curse as it turns us away from our friends and more into an insular existence where those beside you don't matter. It is also not exclusive to one generation, as the ability for the smartphone to capture our attention goes beyond kids, Gen Y'ers, and Gen X'ers. Instead of using time as a way to accomplish more and experience more, we'd rather have it delivered to our iPhones.
Our gadgets are great and serve a wonderful purpose, but we cannot let them become the boss of us. Our time is limited on this planet and we need to experience as much of His creation as we can while we are here. We can throw away our iPhones, our computers, and our TV's. We can quit our jobs and donate all of our money to charity, but even if we live the simplest existence that would make St. John Chrysostom proud, we will still be slaves to time. At the end of the day, we are still in a race against the clock, and eventually our lives will end their journey. We lose the race no matter how long we last in it. So, as the old saying goes that was on my classroom wall in 5th grade: Waste your time, waste your life. Control your time, control your life.
Now, lets figure out how to make up for the hour we lost on Sunday morning. What are YOU going to do with your time?
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