Clearly Daylight

Yesterday morning, Saturday, I started this rant I want Chanda to pass along to her 8th grade science students. Today, I'm gonna finish it.

Daylight Savings Time merely confirms the undeniable fact that measured time is not natural, but a contrivance imposed on the experience of reality by man. Time passes in nature, morning through the night, as the earth turns and exposes different arcs for sun, moon and stars. Rings grow in trees, layers of geology form, water freezes and melts, rain and heat - the seasons happen naturally.

But it has nothing to do with sixty-second minutes, sixty-minute hours, 24 hour days, 365 day years, decades or even centuries. These are measurements marked off by humans, who are never devoid of profit motives, imposed upon our species and, through us, all the flora and fauna of the world, in order to keep the engines of commerce marching in step.

Most of the elements of our culture - speech, mathematics, music - were developed without the intervention of measured time. The species started marking time just as early - notches to mark the days and years, sundials, rudimentary clocks. It wasn't until the 1880s that Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) set a global standard for time. When clocks were invented, Paris would be clocking a completely different time than Cairo, often minutes apart.

And to tell the truth, few devices are locked into a global time. Look at the iPod or cellphone next to you - does its clock match yours? Walk through the office or your house - are all the clocks reading the same time? Which one is "right"?

So by now you have moved at least one clock in the house to the new time. The computer and cell phone companies pushed their version of time to you, and the devices changed automatically. But it's Sunday morning, and for those of us with the day off, no one is writing any schedule for us. Here's the punchline: they never do. Each makes his own decision when to go, when to slow.

Having thus liberated you from the convention, I warn: an anarchist's ramble about measured time might explain five minutes, but 10 minutes late is late.