In less than one week, Daylight Saving Time begins! For
those of you unfamiliar with this phenomena, it signifies when our clocks
“spring forward” one hour which allows us one more hour of daylight each day.
Our winter has been unceremoniously unexciting, in spite of
the weekend snow”dump” that we received. Perhaps, my life is so full and rich
right now that I scarcely noticed the leaving for work in the dark and
returning in the dark months (November-February) that have passed.
Spring-ing forward is also thankfully the
harbinger of well… actually Spring! We are
deceived sometimes by the arrival of warmer weather in our late winter,
but always stay hopeful because surely the snow won’t last at this time of
year. We Canadians are an optimistic bunch!
The loss of that one hour however
always makes me think, even though I know that we will gain it back in
the Fall, when our clocks Fall-back. (It
is a little complicated, I admit.) Although we have experienced this change of timing every year of our lives in this
northern climate, it still instigates conversations of “Will it be darker when
I leave for work at 8am or brighter?” Daylight Savings Time is a holdover of
when folks toiled in the fields and needed more daylight to tend to their crops, and was later endorsed as a fuel saving technique, it’s
brighter and warmer = less consumption.
Another Spring-ing forward makes me think of what I should
be doing with that hour that I am losing. I am long past the stage of my life when I would go to bed an hour
earlier so that I have enough sleep, and I certainly won’t fit in “the hour I
will lose” doing cleaning, laundry or some
other less fulfilling task(!). I will spend my 23
hours on Saturday to the fullest and have a big cup of coffee on Sunday
morning if I am short of sleep. (Just to clarify
the clocks “spring forward” at 2am, when I will no doubt be in the middle of a
deep sleep regardless of how wonderful my day was on Saturday.)
What would you do less of
in a 23 hour day?
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