It’s getting dark earlier, I’m not telling you anything you all aren’t seeing for yourselves. I guess I said that as a wish that it isn’t true, like manifesting or visualizing the seemingly ‘sudden’ change as it begins to rapidly cut down our daylight hours now as though we’ve never experienced this before.
It’s kind of like that first snow and everyone goes around exclaiming, “Oh my gawd, it’s snowing!” Yet we’ve lived here in this weather for years and some of us, our whole lives. One day at the local Safeway, standing in line as the first snow fell heavily outside, I kept hearing everyone saying, “It’s snowing!” “Oh no, snow!” “Is it snowing? I don’t have my tires changed yet.” I looked at the lady behind me and quietly asked, “Doesn’t it usually snow here around this time every year?” She cracked up. “You’d think they had never seen snow in their lives before,” she said.
Sort of the same thing with the inevitable time change, ‘Spring ahead, fall back’ scenario. But there is more to it than that.
In March of 2023 we were reminded in a speech by MLA for Kamloops-South Thompson, Todd Stone that even though the B.C. NDP had passed legislation that would make daylight time permanent across the province, this promise still hadn’t come to fruition. During Question Period, Stone, commented that families were in for another “crude and rude awakening” in the spring of 2023 pointing out the fact even though legislation had been passed permanent daylight savings time four years prior, it hasn’t been implemented province-wide in B.C.
In 2019 the provincial government passed legislation to make daylight savings time permanent for the whole province, with the caveat this could only fully take place once the states of Washington, Oregon and California followed suit, due to economic considerations between us and our neighbours below us along the west coast of the U.S.
Eby’s reply to questions about the delay on implementing the legislation already passed, making daylight savings time permanent, was two-fold, “I think all of us will be delighted to see the back end of daylight time, but at the same time, we want to make sure we are aligned with major trading partners.”
Nothing has changed, granted we’ve had much more important things to contend with this summer, such as drought and wildfires, trying to figure out how to stretch our loonies at the grocery store, and how to stay alive on the highways. But there is another side of this daylight savings time and that is the fact that it will be dark later in the morning hours. Oh wow, now I’m even more torn between light and dark.
Did you know that some health sleep experts feel that if we do move into permanent daylight savings time, adding the extra daylight at the end of the day that our health may suffer from what they consider to be something like ‘permanent jet lag’ and in an open letter to the government from Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia sleep study departments (along with other researchers) they state that our biological clock needs exposure to morning light. When exposure to sunlight in the morning is reduced, our biological clock drifts later, making it harder to wake up and causes an increased conflict between the body clock and local time which they call ‘social jetlag’.
Okay, now I’m really confused by this back and forth, all I know is I just want longer days of sunlight to last right now, without smoke, feeling as though I’ve missed a big chunk of summer, yet I am looking forward to some precipitation, and being contradictory, even snow. Oh geez, I don’t know what I want.
I think I’m just gonna have to rely on the good old practical, just be thankful for what I’ve got philosophy, make the best of things and slap a smile on my face come what may. It really is a pretty amazing thing to be alive on our tired planet, now if we can just figure out how to take better care of our own backyard, in our own neck of the woods. You know when you think about it, compared to what so many have had to deal with this summer, time change doesn’t seem like a big priority in the scheme of things right now that I think about it. I sure haven’t solved anything here, that’s a fact. Some more food for thought.
Oh, the reminder still stands. November 5 your clocks fall back. Enjoy the fall as you get ready to welcome another year ahead in a few short months. Yikes, Thanksgiving, Halloween and Christmas are almost here. No stopping time, daylight or darkness - it’s all in the way you look at it I think.
