Thoughts inspired by daylight saving
It’s about time. I mean that quite literally about our lives. We are born into it, live in it, and then leave it behind eventually. Some use it wisely, others waste it.
But no one escapes time’s clutches.
It’s amazing to me how philosophy creeps into our everyday thoughts, raising questions that leave us wondering.
I thought about time when I was about to turn my clocks ahead an hour for daylight saving time, puzzled about whether time really existed or was simply a human invention. Had I lost an hour as I turned the clocks ahead?
I reached the conclusion that we have invented time to serve our own needs. It is a necessary illusion to measure its passage.
But does time really progress? We think so. But the past is gone even as we store it in memory. We can’t change the past, Perhaps the best we can do is learn from it. The future is not here. All we can do is plan for it, not really knowing what will happen. We have the present. But it is gone the moment we think about it.
We have invented time and are trapped in our own invention, not knowing how to get out. This is the human condition about which philosophers argue.
And when time runs out in every human life, the questions take on new and deeper meaning. How have I used or abused the time I have been given? Is there anything beyond clock time?
I remember years ago when I was editor of my college literary magazine and published a poem in which the writer spoke of everyday life as “millions of time zones.” I wondered if he knew when he wrote that poem then that he would die in a motorcycle accident and never see his poem in print? Or was he somehow aware of the future before it happened and wrote the poem to let us know?
“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” wrote Shakespeare in “Hamlet.”
I’ve often thought of the fishbowl as a metaphor for our lives. We are like a fish swimming in the water, our perceptions limited and even altered looking out through the glass. Time is our fishbowl, and we like the fish not realizing our environment, are caught there.
Understanding the limits of our human condition, we try to consider what’s the best way to live.
I often turn to a practical philosopher, Ben Franklin, for guidance. after all, while he didn’t invent daylight saving time, he did propose a form of daylight time in 1784 in a tongue-in-cheek essay written in Paris suggesting that by getting out of bed an hour early morning light could be better used.
But Franklin’s practical philosophy was best when he offered this advice for living: “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life made of.”