Sunday, November 4, 2012

Time, pt. 6

Something interesting about Daylight Savings Time that I've never noticed. We get to either skip ahead or go back in time. Essentially. If you were awake past 1:00am (the first time) this past Sunday (Editor's Note: Wait, that's today?! Wow, this was a long day...), think about what you were doing at, say, 1:30. An hour later, it was 1:30. Meaning that everyone, according to our calendars, clocks, government, and anyone else who buys into this, had two moments of their life at 1:30am on November 4th, 2012. Consequently, we won't have any moment at 1:30am on whenever DST happens in the spring.

But think about any changes in the grand scheme of things. Time, in this sense, is something we're (quasi-)arbitrarily assigning to live in accordance with. Hell, Arizona doesn't even follow DST. So clearly, there are some caveats with this system. Well, what does that say? From 1:00am-2:00am (the first time) this morning, I was in my 183,347th hour of life, if my math is correct. (And by math, I mean online duration calculator.) The second 1:00am-2:00am I had, I was in hour number 183,348, despite the clocks reading the exact same thing as they had sixty minutes prior.

When I planned to blog about this all day today, I knew what I wanted the body of the post to be (see: above), but didn't really flesh out the conclusion. Now, I'm lacking one. Is this a point for the nonexistence of time? Does everything happen once and only once? How do we define our lives in terms of those hours? The easy solution would be to just be asleep during these times and take it as it comes, but the easy way is rarely the fun one.

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