Time on my mind
When I was five years old I confounded my grandfather by asking, "what is time?" I remember him sputtering and hemming and hawing and never QUITE coming up with an answer that I thought was complete, apt or apropos.
Then, or ever.
Nor did anyone else, really. Time is such an arbitrary thing - the sun rises and sets and seasons change, giving an indication of the passage of time. But although these things are obvious and verifiable the actual divisions of time itself WE made up. Okay, perhaps the planet's tilt and rotation gave us the length of our "year", and the moon gave us a hand with the length of a "month", but even then we futzed around with the calendar, and went from runes and glyphs to something nearly modern like the Julian calendar and cavalierly renamed and recut and reshaped *that* until we got the Gregorian, and even then we have to shove in an extra day every four years to account for our wobbles - but who was it, originally, that divided our days into twenty four hours, precisely? And those hours into sixty minutes? And those minutes into sixty seconds? (Yes, I know I could Google it, probably. SOMEONE will...)
Take an arbitrary human life.
The length of your years seems to be inversely proportional to the length of your life, and that makes sense - when you are two one year is fully half your life and SHOULD at least seem to take longer to pass than the year you spend being forty three, or seventy. Your months seem to speed or drag in precisely inverse proportion to how much you are expected to do within any given month, and the busier the month is the shorter it will appear - and that, too, makes a convolutedly practical kind of sense.
But an hour.
AN HOUR.
An extra hour can give you a bit more rest, if you're tired and you have a chance to catch up on your sleep. You can spend an hour watching an episode of any crappy TV show. You can maybe do a measurable amount of exercise. You could read, if you are a fast reader, almost half a decent-sized book, if it isn't one of the Wheel of TIme volumes. You could do a bit of gardening. You could walk. You could do any number of things. But are ANY of those things worth moving your entire body clock for?
Yes, this is a belated DST rant. So sue me. I'm still chasing down clocks I haven't changed around the house, and I feel like I'm an hour late for everything, and I don't see the point of it - the days are getting longer ANYWAY, dammit all, and that precious hour of extra daylight would have crept around anyway, in the fullness of time, when God decreed it was time for it to be here. Who do we think we are, rearranging time in this manner? It is fully unnnatural.
Leave time alone, until someone somewhere can give me a coherent answer as to what PRECISELY it is - and no, a measure of the passage of our lives doesn't hack it. That describes it, not defines it. Unless a precise and empirically verifiable value of that "extra" hour you tack on or take away can be established I am inclined to say let go, let God, and let it be.
Yeah, I know I have friends out there who will yelp loudly at this little tirade. But I am just not convinced that we are "getting" an extra hour. We're just unravelling our days and adding hem to where the neckhole ought to be, and to me it's just... well, waaaah.
Now I am off on one more and hopefully final round of wandering around fixing clocks.
*mutter*
Then, or ever.
Nor did anyone else, really. Time is such an arbitrary thing - the sun rises and sets and seasons change, giving an indication of the passage of time. But although these things are obvious and verifiable the actual divisions of time itself WE made up. Okay, perhaps the planet's tilt and rotation gave us the length of our "year", and the moon gave us a hand with the length of a "month", but even then we futzed around with the calendar, and went from runes and glyphs to something nearly modern like the Julian calendar and cavalierly renamed and recut and reshaped *that* until we got the Gregorian, and even then we have to shove in an extra day every four years to account for our wobbles - but who was it, originally, that divided our days into twenty four hours, precisely? And those hours into sixty minutes? And those minutes into sixty seconds? (Yes, I know I could Google it, probably. SOMEONE will...)
Take an arbitrary human life.
The length of your years seems to be inversely proportional to the length of your life, and that makes sense - when you are two one year is fully half your life and SHOULD at least seem to take longer to pass than the year you spend being forty three, or seventy. Your months seem to speed or drag in precisely inverse proportion to how much you are expected to do within any given month, and the busier the month is the shorter it will appear - and that, too, makes a convolutedly practical kind of sense.
But an hour.
AN HOUR.
An extra hour can give you a bit more rest, if you're tired and you have a chance to catch up on your sleep. You can spend an hour watching an episode of any crappy TV show. You can maybe do a measurable amount of exercise. You could read, if you are a fast reader, almost half a decent-sized book, if it isn't one of the Wheel of TIme volumes. You could do a bit of gardening. You could walk. You could do any number of things. But are ANY of those things worth moving your entire body clock for?
Yes, this is a belated DST rant. So sue me. I'm still chasing down clocks I haven't changed around the house, and I feel like I'm an hour late for everything, and I don't see the point of it - the days are getting longer ANYWAY, dammit all, and that precious hour of extra daylight would have crept around anyway, in the fullness of time, when God decreed it was time for it to be here. Who do we think we are, rearranging time in this manner? It is fully unnnatural.
Leave time alone, until someone somewhere can give me a coherent answer as to what PRECISELY it is - and no, a measure of the passage of our lives doesn't hack it. That describes it, not defines it. Unless a precise and empirically verifiable value of that "extra" hour you tack on or take away can be established I am inclined to say let go, let God, and let it be.
Yeah, I know I have friends out there who will yelp loudly at this little tirade. But I am just not convinced that we are "getting" an extra hour. We're just unravelling our days and adding hem to where the neckhole ought to be, and to me it's just... well, waaaah.
Now I am off on one more and hopefully final round of wandering around fixing clocks.
*mutter*