Saturday, April 03, 2004

Daylight-Saving Time

Two a.m. tomorrow morning will instantaneously become three a.m. as most of the U.S. springs ahead to Daylight-Saving Time. Closing in on 29 1/2, I find myself preferring DST to Standard Time, where in my youth the opposite was true. Maybe it's because I sleep earlier that I don't mind losing an hour. I also don't mind that it appears brighter later. As an avid walker, I'll take all the daylight I can get.

My friend Christine Boylan wrote a one-act play called Every Third Thought in which a lonely man tries to stay up every year for the switch to Standard Time, believing that night magical enough to let him rewind his life.

I've come to embrace the passage of time--it's passing anyway, like it or not--and what I've learned in that time. I wouldn't want to return to a state of less awareness. As much as we would like to freeze the good times, part of what makes them so good is their temporarity. (Not sure that's a real word, but it's got "rarity" in it, and that's my point. We wouldn't cherish good times in the first place if they were common and dragged on.) Finite time also means we don't have to dwell on the bad times. Indeed, there is no time to dwell on them.

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