If you have recently risen from bed and are slightly out of step with the rest of us, perhaps you failed to advance the clocks in your house before retiring. If it's of any consolation, you are not probably alone. Some of us deal with the annual 'spring forward/fall back' routine better than others.
To me, it's another way we're separate from all the other lifeforms on the planet. Animal, vegetable, mineral, most everything else adapts to the 'gets dark later/gets bright earlier' hot and cold parts of life on the Big Blue Marble, but not us. We impose, or attempt to, ourselves on our environment and surroundings.
We create a concept we call "time" and then work on its division into seconds and minutes that added together we call hours and then gather twenty-four of them (no other species does, aside from the rabbit in Through the Looking Glass), pronouncing that to be a day.
We then line up a bunch of days into something we call a week, combining them in various clusters of varying lengths called months concluding here, my dear, with that which we call a year. Not bad for bi-peds with big brains and opposable thumbs (and basic cable).
For the next couple of days, most of us will be out of sorts and/or out of sync and will blame it on shifting of those damn clocks. I'm not sure that's valid for anyone other than the people working the 11 to 7 overnight shift (who had an hour shaved off their day today, but work nine and get paid for eight at some point this fall), but it sounds great and we all do it. Why we really should be ouchy and grouchy is that so few of us have a plan for what to do with the extra daylight. More's the pity.
We could start a garden, read to a child, go for a walk, visit with a friend, spend more time with a loved one, fly a kite, ride a bike, paint a fence (or a masterpiece) or write a letter. Of course, you could say, we don't need more daylight to do any of those things. And you're right, we don't. So why don't we just do them?
-bill kenny
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