You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
The way I feel this morning.
I went to bed at a decent hour.
I woke up feeling like I was hit in the head with a sledge hammer.
I’m not sick or hung over. But my head is throbbing and my senses are tingling in a bad way. My eyes are sore, and my equilibrium is off. Something is wrong.
I look at the clock and it reads 8:30am. Really? 8:30 am.
It feels wrong. I feel like I have been deceived by the Earth and sun as the light is filtering through my bedroom window on this vespertine morning.
I slide the covers down and sit up. Birds are chirping and the morning sounds ordinary, but it’s not.
I am disoriented. I feel like a crime victim, like something was stolen from me.
I walk down the hallway looking for crime tape or an outline of a body on the floor.
“Somethings not right,” I mutter to myself.
As I wobble down the stairs, holding on tight to the banister, it dawns on me.
Daylight Savings Time (DST) has mugged me, like a thug on a New York City subway train. Somehow, in the middle of the night, this nefarious cat burglar has broken into my home and pilfered something from me.
My body clock is askew and like a tuning fork smeared in jelly, it is warbling with an odd inconsistent vibration.
I know it is only an hour, but losing an hour is like losing one shoe. Try walking in one shoe and I guarantee you’ll limp.
I throw on a pot of coffee, hoping a cup of caffeine will give me back the hour I have lost.
Then I look up at the microwave and the blue digital clock is flashing at me, hypnotically, reminding me that my internal clock is all messed up.
I step back and that’s when I realize that humans are like wind up clocks. Though we are flesh and blood, we are also the most unique timing mechanism ever assembled. We know when we are hungry and when we should sleep and wake.
Like a wrist watch, every moving part is connected to every other moving part. Time is a precise instrument of measurement that keeps balance and order. The spring, the coils, the second hand. Each tiny, delicate piece is dependent upon the other synchronously timed mechanism. We are living atomic clocks of existence. When our time is suddenly short sheeted, it has a profound effect on us.
Like a butterfly flapping its wing across the ocean, eventually a hurricane force will be felt. So to wake up and suddenly have one less hour, well that is a fundamental disruption in my body clock, a serious shift in my personal time space continuum.
That is my philosophical explanation of what your local weather caster calls SPRING FORWARD.
“Don’t forget to set your clock ahead one hour tonight,” every weather man reads from the AMS manual.
Whoops. Forgot.
I drink my coffee and feel exhausted. It’s amazing how off center I am.
It’s only 8:30 but I all ready feel like the day is lost. Thanks DST.
It’s like having the flu without any of the symptoms.
I resign myself to a day that will be spent recalibrating my internal body clock.
I am exhausted. I just hope that I can fall asleep tonight.
And that is crazy.