March 14, 2021. Sunset 7:16. PM. San Francisco, CA.
Daylight Savings Time begins. Not one of my favorite days of the year. The one reliable, smooth transition in these times - is our ride around the sun. Seasons come and go, crossfading from one to the next. The sun rises and sets, daylight and darkness incrementally exchanging places with one another. If we were to single out any particular day from any year and compare the balance of daylight and darkness on that exact day in any other year in the history of time, it would be about the same. Yet, somehow, it seems we’ve come to equate Daylight Savings Time with the notion of Daylight Preservation Time. That somehow, by wrenching the clocks an hour forwards every Spring we will prolong the daylight. The daylight that is already increasing very nicely all on its own. And what about the morning? Oh, we’ve chopped off that hour of light and tacked it onto the end of the day instead. Ah- so let’s yank the time back an hour in the fall so we can shift that shrunken window of light to illuminate the start of our day now that it’s become too dark in the morning.
It makes perfect sense to me to stop the sudden changes back and forth and to accept the gentle expansion and contraction of the day as if it were breathing light. However, the idea of remaining in Daylight Savings Time strikes me as a bit delusional, a futile attempt to keep the darkness from returning too soon at the end of the day. I would prefer to stay in Standard time for many reasons. Not the least of which is that it signals a willingness to be in sync with the rest of the world.
Day 368 since March 11, 2020
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