March 13/14 Spring Forward

Time keeps on flying by in a flash; like a waking dream, life continues its journey onward.

We lost an hour in the middle of the night.  It was time to spring forward once more. Our clocks are a representation of a myriad of calculations. On timepieces everywhere, the little hands tell us what our body only guesses at. The passage of time keeps moving on and we live our lives based on the spinning of wheels and gears. In the new digital age, the wheels and gears are microcosms of ones and zeros. Infinite calculations tell us of our finite lives.

Will there be a day when we stop changing our clocks to match an archaic system from days long past?

For the last one hundred plus years, our country and most other western nations of the world have used Daylight Savings Time. The system to change the clocks in the spring and in the fall was first proposed in 1908 in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and by the end of World War One, most of Canada and many other countries in the world had adopted the policy of setting the clocks ahead by an hour in spring and back an hour in the fall. The initial use of Daylight Saving Time coincided with the two world wars. This was an effort to save power and fuel in the winter by having the sunrise earlier in the day. Today fourty percent of the world uses this method of keeping and changing time.

In recent years many people have questioned the need to change the clock. Just before covid gripped the world, BC was toying with the idea of scrapping the change altogether. If we stay on permanent Daylight Savings Time, would that mean the hour we lost last night will be gone forever?

I’m pretty sure I lived that hour so how could it be gone… All strange questions left for philosophers and rambling evenings smoking funny herbs.

2021 could be the last year we make the switch. In the United States, there is a push to make DST permanent, it is one of the few things Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on. In Europe, the European parliament passed a law making 2021 the last year that the clocks will change. Today may well be the last time any of us will have to come out of our slumber and remember how to change the clock on the microwave.

The coronaverse may be a good time to rid ourselves of the archaic practice and start a new beginning. It would mean the start of the pandemic the world stood still. The end of the pandemic could be symbolized when the world no longer fell back. The last time change would be to spring forward.

Hopefully by this November when it’s time to fall back we will be living in our new reality. Living in a reality full of freedom, freedom from our viral foe, and freedom from the need to ever go back in time again.

Below is a map of the world. The blue is where Daylight Saving is used today, the orange is where it has been used in the past but is no longer. And the red shows countries that have never used Daylight Savings Time.