This weekend we "fell back" to Standard Time. For me, it's a relief - I can breathe better. I always felt that I was behind somehow when we operated under Daylight Savings Time - while there was a extra hour at the end of the day, my mornings were hurried and frantic. Most frustrating for me is the disruption of sleep-patterns. Mine is already jacked up so that hour one way or another can send my already fragile eco-system into a tailspin. I already dread "springing forward." But I had no idea that there was such a big hoop-la out there until I read this angst-y post online yesterday. Seems there are some pretty passionate debates between the fall-back-ers and the spring-forward-ers. Florida and California want to save daylight perpetually. Arizona and Hawaii have decided to opt out of the clock changing and stick with standard year round. I did cursory research into why we started this in the first place and it seems like there was the idea that it would reduce energy consumption. It has not proven to have had much impact one way or the other. And while I function so much better in this light-season, I know many prefer summer-time. But. Who are we kidding here? We are not adding or taking away anything. We still have the same amount of light. It's all in how it is allotted.
About that sleep pattern... I've been waking up in the wee hours for years, now. Sometimes, I manage to doze back off after a few minutes... sometimes, I just throw in the towel and get up. It's actually better than it used to be but there were seasons when I would make a nightly creep into the den, turn on a little lamp and curl up in the corner of the sofa. I kept a Bible and journal there and I would read and write and pray until it was time for the house to awake. It was there, scooched up into the corner, that I learned something very important about light. When I turned so that the lamp was behind me and the light fell over my shoulder, I could see the Bible and notebook ok, but if I looked up into the dark of the room, into the far corners, there were shadows. Unknown shapes were lurking there - not too far away. My very own silhouette imposed uncertainty onto the familiar surroundings. Don't miss this... when I turned my back to the light source, I became a part of the scary dark things. The only way to avoid this phenomenon was to turn around. The shadows were still there, and some of them still me-shaped, but as long as I looked toward the light they were behind me. The reading and writing were much clearer. The dark less ominous. All it took was a shift of posture. Turning toward the light while turning toward The Light.
So, here in this new cycle of measuring our time, maybe we would be better off if we concentrated on The Light instead of day-light and looked to The Standard instead of world-standard. Shifted our posture to face the right direction and leave the clock to count on as it will. Because, it will. And the way we spend the hours is much more important than how we mark them. A guy named Jesus once said: Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? (Luke 12:25) As usual, he nailed it. Selah.
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