I got up early on Sunday morning. Or I thought I did.
The clock said 6:30 but it was actually 7:30. Ah yes, it was the beginning of daylight savings time.
Love it or hate it, it is the present reality as we know it. Of course, anyone could stay on good old standard time if they wanted too, since really the measurement of time is just an invention of man. But there are some people you would have to convince that it would be okay to do that, like your boss.
Time is important when it comes to business, both in running it and dealing with it. Its dictates run the gamut of importance from clocking in to making appointments. We have deadlines, time constraints and dead time. It’s all there, and knowing what time it is in some type of organized fashion is important.
Every year the Utah State Legislature has one bill or another to stop the state from switching to daylight savings time and to stay on standard time, well, all the time. Presently Arizona and Hawaii are the only whole states that don’t follow the flow. With as weird as Utah can be from the norm, you’d think we would vary from it, but we haven’t since the nation as a whole set its sights on holding to it.
The history of organized time goes way back, but it was when man started to be able to transport himself across vast areas of land very quickly that the idea of putting time into zones, often spanning hundreds of miles, took hold. Before that, villages and towns often had their own time “zone.” Imagine living in a town and it is 3 o’clock in the afternoon there and going two miles down the road and finding out the residents in that town think it is only noon.
In terms of organization it is amazing anyone got anything done before time was organized in the way we have it today, but you have to remember those were largely agricultural societies based on longer time spans that were more important to them than what minute it was. They measured time in seasons and milked the cows, well, when the cows were ready.
Information also traveled slowly in those days. It came by horseback or someone walking through town. In the early days of America news from Europe sometimes took two to three months to reach the United States. Wars were sometimes over before anyone knew they even happened.
Trains ran on time
So with standard time zones in place train schedules could be arranged so that people arrived when they said they would. Later it became more important as cars and planes began to move human beings even faster. So when time zones came into being, some wanted to tinker with them, thus daylight savings time.
Daylight savings time was actually adopted in places in Canada first, town by town to begin with. Thunder Bay, Ontario (then called Port Arthur) was the very first town to adopt a change in the time in the spring and the fall in 1908, with a number of other cities moving along the same path over the next few years. Imagine living outside those towns and traveling to them and finding you were in a different time world, well at least by an hour one way or the other. So if you hate the change in time that takes place twice a year, you can blame Canadians.
I’ve always been fascinated by time. Most people know about Albert Einstein and his work about time, matter and space. E=mc2 is in common use in our language, but people who repeat it often don’t understand it. Neither do I really, just thought I would mention it. Hell, I still can’t figure out how to get stupid, unwanted icons off the screen of my cell phone, much less understand relativity (other than that my cousin is my father’s brother’s son). But based on Einstein’s theories of relativity time figures quite heavily in their meaning.
What’s the reality?
However after reading about time for years, based on what science and philosophers say about it, it is apparent that no one really knows if it it exists in in linear form as most of us seem to perceive it or if it is just a block, there all at once and we are just a part of that block. The questions that arise are mind boggling. Are we being misled by our human perspective on time? Is the idea that time actually passes not real at all? Many of us (including me) often say that the only real moment is the present, with the future not here yet and the past gone. Or is it just there all the time, future, present and past rolled into one big ball. When astronomers discover a new universe that is 200 million light years away, are what we are seeing in our telescopes something that happened that long ago, or is it just what it is, forever being as we see it at that moment?
I guess that is all to heavy for a column on daylight savings time, but the fact that we can change what time it is, or more to the point, change what time it is by legislation, shows something in the human experience that reveals our essential tie to it. It also illustrates our inability to not modify the laws of physics, just because some politician think it is a good idea.
The few so-called primitive tribes that still live on the earth don’t pay to much attention to the clock. They pay more attention to the seasons than they do to the minutiae we call minutes and seconds. I think they may be the ones that have it right. Many anthropologists have said these kinds of groups of people are the happiest humans on earth. And I bet in part at least is their ability to not care about time much.
But there is one more thing that makes me think our concept of time maybe off a bit.
Do the deer in mountains, the birds in the trees or the worms in the ground, or for that matter any other sentient beings on this earth besides humans really care about what time it is? Hard to say for sure, but they do seem to move to a different kind of clock, which our state legislature has little control over. It is called survival. Maybe time for us is just survival mechanism, like burrowing in the ground or hibernation is for some animals.
There is one thing I do know about time however. My dogs always know when it is time to be fed.
That is one appointment they never let me forget.