What’s Up With That?

It’s that time of year where we “fall back.” And the news articles explain how we have an extra hour of time and often ask how will we use this extra hour of time that miraculously appeared out of nowhere.

Let’s face it, time exists independ of any clock. Daylight savings time is a pain in the ass, where we have to wander around our house and change clocks, microwaves, coffee pots, and wrist watches. Then we have to go outside and change the clock in our car.

There was a “time” when we had to change the time on our computers — that is mostly automatic these days.

So Joyce is wandering around the house “changing” the time. While I couldn’t care less what some timepiece says. She won’t change the clock on my nightstand, she will try to make me change it. I won’t because I never look at it and really would prefer to throw it away, but I sometimes use it to charge my iPhone or listen to music.

I don’t need to know what time it is. One hour each way doesn’t make a difference. I need to know if it is daytime of nighttime, if it is morning, mid-day or afternoon. I don’t need a clock to know. I don’t even need to know what day it is. My life isn’t different if it is Sunday or Tuesday. Ocassionally I need to know if it is Joyce’s birthday, our anniversary, or Christmas. My iPhone reminds me ahead of time so I can buy her a present, and it also reminds when the day arrives to give her the present.

So instead of contemplating a mystical appearance of an extra 60 minutes in our lives, perhaps we should recognize that each of us will have a finite amount of time to live, and the fact we don’t know how much time that will be. Perhaps today might be a good time to look at how we have used our time during the past year, and acknowledge that any time we wasted is gone forever — moving forward we can, perhaps, focus on better utilizing our time today, next week, next month, next year, and the rest of our lives. The more time you save, the more time you use for leisure activities. For me, the more time I spend backpacking and camping the happier I am.

You might want to read Managing Your Recreation Inventory