EDT vs EST

I’m preoccupied with time; the limited quantity of time that I have every day and every week and really for the rest of my life. It’s Friday, and I worked in the office today, which I don’t typically do. I arrived home at 5:20 or so, did a few minor chores, and then changed into my sneakers to go walking. I had only about 30 minutes of daylight remaining and that daylight was the achingly lovely early November sunset light that creates a glow around everything including the trees that are already a riot of color. The leaves crunched beneath my feet as I walked as fast as I could, trying to outrun the waning golden daylight. I turned the corner back onto my street just a minute or so before it was well and truly dark, and just as I remembered that this will be my last after-work walk for a while. We fall back on Sunday, an extra hour of sleep in exchange for months of early darkness. 

Yesterday, I heard a news story about Daylight Savings Time on NPR, with a new angle on the debate about keeping the annual clock adjustments or dumping them. Like most people I know, I was delighted when the Senate voted last year to make DST permanent. An extra hour of daylight during the darkest hours of the year would be such a gift, and by late January, we’d have daylight until 6:30 PM or so. 

But I had to be at work by 7:30 on Thursday morning, which means that I had to leave the house by 6:45, which means that I had to drive to work in the dark, which I really really hate. I don’t just hate driving in the dark, I also hate feeling like I’m starting my day in the middle of the night. Although I have to admit, it was really nice seeing the sun rise over Walter Reed as I drove on to the base. 

The NPR story featured a doctor who believes that we should ditch the semi-annual clock back-and-forth, but that Daylight Savings Time is the wrong time standard to hang on to. I was working as I listened so I fogged out a bit during the part where he presented his evidence about circadian rhythms and sleep patterns. But he summed it up in a pretty compelling way, and he just about had me convinced. 

The thing is, though, that by keeping Standard Time, we wouldn’t be making winter any worse than it already is. But we’d be making summer less great. I love those weeks in late June and early July when the daylight hangs on until almost 9 PM. I’d hate to give that up. But I’d also hate months of mornings when the sun doesn’t rise until 8 o’clock. 

There’s no making me happy is there? I know. 

*****

It’s Sunday now, the first Sunday in November, and half of my clocks, the digital ones connected to the internet in one way or another, all read 9:18 AM and my old analog clocks all read 10:18 AM. Someone will turn those clocks back at some point. But we all know what time it is. And that was it - we fell back, we got our extra hour of sleep, and now it’s going to be dark before 6 PM for maybe the next two months. Blah.  

So my conclusion is that as terrible as it is to deal with the one-hour shifts twice a year, we should keep the whole Rube Goldberg spit and glue system in place because it’s the least terrible way to manage the daylight hours and make sure that as many people as possible get as much daylight as possible on both ends of the day. It won’t give me any extra time in a day but I’ll still get 24 hours, same as everyone else.