“Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside...” - Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast
I hate the cold weather. I always have. Lately, I’ve figured out what it is about the cold that I really dislike and it doesn’t have much to do with the temperature.
It’s the light, or lack thereof. It comes around this time of year when the sun starts to set before I leave work. Soon, it will be dark when I have to wake up and that’s really when I start to hate the cold weather.
I’m not a morning person, never have been. But, my ability to rise in the morning really takes a beating when my alarm goes off and the sun isn’t even up yet.
How have we managed to arrange our lives so that our jobs require us to get up before the sun? Many of us wake up before the sun, so we flip on a light switch so we can see in order to get dressed. We use electricity to brew a cup of coffee to wake us up. We remote-start our cars 10 minutes before we plan to leave so it is warm inside for our commutes. And we make all of this an hour worse than it has to be by rolling our clocks backwards right at the start of the bad weather.
How easily all of this would be solved if we decided that whatever we’re doing is not important enough to do it before the sun comes up. I believe the bears have it right. Take the winter off. That’s what my body is trying to tell me to do.
One of my goals is to arrange my life so I never have to get up before the sun does. I’m pretty close I think. I’ll update my progress on that front as this journal progresses.
p.s. Daylight savings
Here’s my solution that would fix the daylight savings situation immediately. Adjust the time everyday, 365 days a year, based on sunrise and sunset. Pick a time, whatever we all agree upon, and restart our clocks everyday to that time when the sun comes up. I like 6 a.m. You may like 4:30, whatever, it doesn’t matter.
We all have phones and computers and wifi enabled devices, etc. that could do this for us. Guess what, tomorrow the sun is going to rise 3 minutes later than it did today. So tomorrow that is 6 am. We lose 3 minutes of our day or we gain 3 minutes, minutes we’ll never notice day to day, but we will notice at the end of a long season.
This way we get the most use out of our sun, year round. Right now we get too much light in the summer and not enough in the winter. This way we get the maximum amount of light everyday of the year. Write your congresspersons...
