Synchronize Your Clocks

I woke up this morning already losing an hour. It is not 6:45, as my clock showed, but 7:45. Of course, it doesn't matter what time it is because I am retired and don't have to go to work and I wouldn't likely be going anywhere early on Sunday morning anyway.

We have now entered Daylight Savings Time. Which is a misnomer because no daylight is actually saved.

But what an arbitrary thing time is anyway. Why is it 7 AM in one place and 6 Am somewhere else? You can, literally, take one step and travel through time if you happen to be at the demarcation point between time zones. Or a whole day if you cross the International Date Line. Which I have done a few times. Well, on a ship. You cannot actually walk across it since they cleverly drew it around all land masses. Could you imagine your neighbor across the street (or in the next town) existing in a different day than you?

All time is arbitrary on this planet. We call it Coordinated Universal Time (actually, we call it Temps Universel Coordonnéor UTC) now. But, not so long ago, we called it Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). It began because men went to sea and went out of sight of land in order to get to another land. When you go to sea to the point where land is no longer visible, you need a reference point in time for purposes of navigation. GMT was/is Solar Mean Time. It is arbitrarily the time when the sun is directly overhead in Greenwich, England. Though that isn't actually true every day of the year, is it? But it was a reference point and navigation requires a reference point.

I used to wonder why we divide the day into 24 hours. It seems we might not have except the ancient Sumerians liked the idea of 12 and it caught on. After all, there is no real reason we couldn't have divided the day into 10 hours. But, for some reason, they decided on 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night. Something that only happens on one day twice a year. And now we are stuck with it. And that is fortunate, I suppose, since it fits within our conception of a spherical earth (which really is only nominally a sphere) and allowed us to divide it into 360 degrees. A number usefully divisible by 12. Or maybe we have just grown used to it.

In any case, time is not a fixed thing. It is an invention and a convention. It is something we all agree on, for the most part. Except maybe for what year it is. That can depend upon what culture you belong to or live in.

So, if you haven't, set your clocks forward one hour unless you live in Arizona or one of the other places that refuse to follow this silly Daylight Savings ritual.