For most people, changing over into Daylight Savings Time is no big deal. I am not most people. For me, this setting my clocks an hour ahead feels like tumbling down the rabbit hole.
For 12 years, I lived in Arizona, one of only two states in the union that don’t participate in Daylight Savings Time (the other is Hawaii). Arizona likes to stay out of step with the rest of the country like that. In Arizona, time is as permanent as stone. But here, in the Northwest, time feels imaginary; less like the drumbeat of the universe and more like something we invented. If time can change, is anything absolute? Those immutable stones crumble into dust.
I understand the theory behind moving the hands of the clock back an hour in the fall and forward in the spring. But the awkward biannual shift shows that no matter how much we try to impose human limits and rules on the world, the world plays by its own. We can change our clocks, but can’t change when the sun will rise and set. There comes a time when we have to accept that we have less control than we thought.
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Jonny Eberle is a writer in Tacoma, WA adrift in the streams of time. When he isn’t busy figuring out how to change the clock in his car, he tweets a lot. Thanks for reading!
J.W. Eberle 
4 responses to “The Madness of Clocks”
We have so many things controlling our lives. Some we can control and others outwith our control. We just have to learn to cope.
The clocks in the UK don’t change until the end of March and the end of September.
Very true. It’s been very interesting to me to learn how much the timing of changing clocks varies from place to place. It’s even less standard than I thought it was!
They want to stop moving the clocks back in the Autumn as more accidents happen at night than in the mornings.
In southern Scotland this will mean that it will not get light until about 09.30 in midwinter and will get dark at 16.45 instead of 15.45.
I really don’t know which I prefer.
There is a similar debate in the States over a correlation between an extra hour of darkness in the evening and increased crime. Don’t know if anything will change, though. Change comes slowly.