Tinkering with Time Again? ⏳

Image Credit: kai Stachowiak

Now, I am not necessarily a fan of changing my clocks in the Spring and Fall, but it won’t kill me to do it. Yesterday, the U.S. Senate passed a bill to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. Yet, did anyone refer to what happened in the 70s when this occurred? Are we sure we really want to do this? A national experiment was conducted during an energy crisis when most of the United States went to year-round Daylight Saving Time.

Simply put, folks weren’t too happy about it. It wasn’t a pretty sight because there were a lot of hiccups occurring across the country, and needless to say, we reverted to the way it currently is. “Be careful what you ask for,” my mother would say to us.

No matter what they do to tinker with time, you can’t change it. The sun, moon, and stars don’t wind their clocks to adjust to our wants and conveniences just to appease us. Nature is going to operate on the same timetable as it always has, regardless of what we do to manipulate the time. Yet, I have to ask, whether we stick with our current time changes or not, will “we” change? Will this make people get along better or help us to make wiser decisions where humankind is not unkind but aware of our purpose, position, policies, and behavior? Can we take a page from nature and adjust to the natural order of creation’s timetable and change that person in the mirror to do better and be better?

So, we’re tinkering with time again. Will changing it make us better, worse, or the same old mess warmed over again and again?

Time After Time

Image Credit: raggio5 (Pixabay)

For those of us who are going through time-shifting this weekend, get ready to be thrown off balance again. Hey, I am already screwed up with this being November, and realizing our calendar year ends next month on the 31st is affecting the sanity of my thought processes.

Sooooo, tonight, or should I say first thing in the morning, we will set our clocks back one hour until spring 2022. 

Clocks are changed back by one hour from local daylight time to local standard time. In the U.S., many citizens overwhelmingly object to the time change that we all have known and grown to adapt to. As of 2021, at least 33 states have introduced legislation to end this time-changing practice.

Daylight Saving Time has been used in the U.S. and in many European countries since World War I. At that time, in an effort to conserve fuel needed to produce electric power, Germany and Austria took time by the forelock, and began saving daylight at 11:00 p.m. on April 30, 1916, by advancing the hands of the clock one hour until the following October. Other countries immediately adopted this 1916 action: Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey, and Tasmania. Nova Scotia and Manitoba adopted it as well, with Britain following suit three weeks later, on May 21, 1916. In 1917, Australia and Newfoundland began saving daylight.

The plan was not formally adopted in the U.S. until 1918. ‘An Act to preserve daylight and provide standard time for the United States‘ was enacted on March 19, 1918. On January 4, 1974, President Nixon signed into law the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act of 1973. -www.webexhibits.org

Now, although many people want to end time-changing as we know it, exactly how is that going to make matters more confusing? Who’s in, who’s out, and who’s totally screwed up when everyone is doing their own thing? What happens to tech that is automatically digitized, and what is that going to do to the current algorithms? When the U.S. tried permanent daylight saving time during the 1970s energy crisis, people hated it. Just sayin’.

What Time is It Again?

So we fell back an hour yesterday, as we allegedly gained an hour of sleep, but did we really? In the spring we sprang forward an hour for Daylight Saving Time and now we’ve returned to observing Standard Time. No matter what we schedule our clocks to, we cannot manipulate actual time. It is what it is, day or night.

Many lawmakers are trying to alleviate the practice of springing ahead or falling back, but which time will they go with? Will they decide on the one we recognize in the spring or the hour we supposedly gain in the fall? Regardless of their decision, time cannot be altered. Only God has control of true, bonafide time. This is what I believe. 

If lawmakers have their way, what do you think (should they decide to stop shifting the time by one hour) they will decide to do? Will they stick to recognizing the springing ahead or falling back an hour? Sometimes, we can really make a mess of things by complicating a simple matter, can’t we? 😉 Yet, sometimes the smallest things can make the biggest difference!