It Waits for No Man 11/6/2022

By: Jennifer Richardson Holt

It was disconcertingly dark when I took my daughter to school on Friday morning. The beginning of the week had produced some breathtaking sunrises.  There were pink glowing wisps of clouds that changed to gold melting into the bright glow of day.  I was saddened that my drive took me west instead of east so my best view was in my rear view mirror.  But after those shining views the last weekday saw me pulling out of my garage with a furrowed brow. I remember asking why it was so dark to no one in particular. My daughter certainly didn’t have any ideas to contribute.  I know the seasons are changing and the nights are lengthening, but this just seemed all so sudden. No, it wasn’t pitch black outside but the sky was cloudless and the best it could muster was some shade of slate blue that made it seem like we were not very far from the navy of the wee hours.  I simply wasn’t ready for things to change so significantly.  But the times, in more ways than one, they are a’changing.

I suppose you can guess that I am, at least somewhat going to address that well-intentioned but unpleasant concept that is daylight savings time.  I promise I won’t dwell on it too long but, really, is this something we need to continue?  In writing this I decided to do a bit of research on this practice. I thought I was in the know as to why we began changing the time but I was thoroughly not and quite frankly this may have made my disdain worse. I assumed that this application had agricultural beginnings and somehow better served farmers by giving them more hours of daylight hence I felt that at some point it probably was a useful idea.  However, when I looked into things, I discovered that this is a myth.  In fact the idea was first mentioned by Benjamin Franklin in the 1700s as a joke about conserving candles. It was in a satirical letter for the love of Pete!  Then America didn’t even standardize the practice until 1966.  So my visuals of some grateful plowman getting a bit more light to do whatever it is long ago plowman do to crops at this time of year just flew completely out the proverbial window. We in fact do this to conserve electricity.  I mean that just seems so, trite. What if you don’t have a lot of windows so your house isn’t that highly supplied by natural light?  This isn’t making one hill of beans difference to you.  And we really aren’t changing anything. We aren’t opening some secret treasure chest that holds an enchanted sixty minutes of sunshine that was hidden away. We are just simply renaming time. We aren’t saving anything.  We are just really playing a game of pretend by calling one hour by the name of another for a span of some months and then after that calling it the first name again.  As you can see by my moaning and groaning I do not care for daylight savings time.  I don’t even particularly mind the way the light changes with the season but when my workday ends and it looks like I have roughly 5 minutes until I should be soundly sleeping, well I just do not care for that in the least.  It feels like a little chunk of my day, and if you get right down to it, my life has been stolen.  And we all know time is fleeting enough, I don’t need to add thievery to the mix.

I am fine though with the natural way that things do change at this season. Now yes, as I mentioned before I don’t like how the darker mornings just snuck up on me as they did this week but I am content with the lengthening of the nights. I don’t just love the dark or anything of the sort but I have come to have a new perspective on these colder darker months.  This world is preparing for its season of rest. Just like most of us get our rest in the dark so does nature.  The activity of plant and animal slows to a more conservative pace.  The autumn and winter are their chance to rejuvenate and prepare before the bursting forth of spring. They don’t have any need to call the hours by a different name because they don’t name them at all. They simply follow what they were created to do. The sun runs its course and provides instruction and so they have preparation in the final productivity of fall, rest in quiet darkness of winter, new life and awakening in the spring and flourishing in the richness of summer.  It has worked for them since the dawn of time, though I suppose electricity consumption was never high on the flora and fauna list of concerns.

And so here we are in autumn sliding apparently very quickly to winter.  And as the light and dark are assuming their roles appropriate for the season at hand, perhaps we should all take a note from the trees. The leaves change to golds and scarlets because they are preparing. They seal themselves off and the green that once was, is no longer dominant as they prepare to rest. They’re really just showing the colors that had been hidden by the excessive amounts of green that they once had when they were busy at work producing food. Those magical other colors were always there it was just when things began to calm and slow that they could shine forth. Perhaps we need to remember even the Creator took a rest after making all that is. It certainly wasn’t because He needed it but because rest is good. While He didn’t need it, we most certainly do.  If we could slow our busy stride and give ourselves a bit of grace to not always be in a constant state of striving to achieve and accomplish, who knows what glorious colors of the soul we could stumble upon that had been hidden by the green of ambition. While that productive shade serves us well in its season we cannot forget the infinite value of good, wholesome rest.