What, really, does it mean to save daylight?
We change our clocks in a misguided effort to somehow change the nature of days. In reality, of course, a day is a day, twenty-four hours, however you slice it. The silliness and hubris that resulted in having us change our clocks every six months or so does not change the fact that a day is a day. It does irritate and bother many people and dogs, however.
I propose a different approach.
Since saving daylight, in a physical sense, is not actually possible, I suggest we try to save daylight within ourselves. We could strive to save up all those golden hours, the ones that are lit up by the sun as well as those that lit us up on the inside, the ones that made us feel happy, loved, and contented. We all have those. We don’t need calendars or clocks or politicians to tell us when those hours are happening, or why. We don’t need to confine them to certain months of the year. And maybe we could store up those bright happy hours for the darker times, when we struggle to find reasons to smile.
Let’s put all of those hours in our Daylight Savings Accounts, tucked away and banked for the lean times, when we need them.
It might even help to write them down, keep a running list, and hang it up on the wall. Then on those gloomy, grim days, when we feel beset with the world’s problems or our own, we could take a peek at our Daylight Savings Accounts and think, Oh yes, there’s that, still bright and lovely, still gaining interest! And what about that lovely time? I remember that. That still makes me smile. And we’d see how much, really, we have banked, stored carefully away, untouchable by whatever might be getting us down right now.
That’s what I call Daylight Savings! That is something I can get on board with. What about you?
“I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind . . . At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves.”― Robertson Davies, The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks
“He asked me once what I wanted when I died, what I wanted out of life, and I told him I just wanted more happy memories than sad ones.”― R. YS Perez, I Hope You Fall in Love
“Happy memories are the best shields against unhappy days.” ― T.M Cicinski, A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow
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Thanks for listening,
Kay
P.S. MerryThoughts is the name of my first book, out of print at the moment. The word is a British one, referring both to a wishbone and to the ritual of breaking the wishbone with the intention of either having a wish granted or being the one who marries first, thus the “merry thoughts.”