Daylight Savings Time Ends Quotes

Like we all sync our watches every year, at the start and at the end of daylight saving time, we also need to sync our relationships once in a while.

The tunnel of winter had settled over our lives, ushered in by that great official Hoodwink, the end of daylight saving time. Personally I would vote for one more hour of light on winter evenings instead of the sudden, extra-early blackout. Whose idea was it to jilt us this way, leaving us in cold November with our unsaved remnants of daylight petering out before the workday ends? In my childhood, as early as that, I remember observing the same despair every autumn: the feeling that sunshine, summertime, and probably life itself had passed me by before I'd even finished a halfway decent tree fort. But mine is not to question those who command the springing forward and the falling back. I only vow each winter to try harder to live like a potato, with its tacit understanding that time is time, no matter what any clock might say. I get through the hibernation months by hovering as close as possible to the woodstove without actual self-immolation, and catching up on my reading, cheered at regular intervals by the excess of holidays that collect in a festive logjam at the outflow end of our calendar.

When communicating science to the general public in lectures or writing, I’m always wary of bombarding an audience with never-ending mortality and morbidity statistics, lest they themselves lose the will to live in front of me. It is hard not to do so with such compelling masses of studies in the field of sleep deprivation. Often, however, a single astonishing result is all that people need to apprehend the point. For cardiovascular health, I believe that finding comes from a “global experiment” in which 1.5 billion people are forced to reduce their sleep by one hour or less for a single night each year. It is very likely that you have been part of this experiment, otherwise known as daylight savings time. In the Northern Hemisphere, the switch to daylight savings time in March results in most people losing an hour of sleep opportunity. Should you tabulate millions of daily hospital records, as researchers have done, you discover that this seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day. Impressively, it works both ways. In the autumn within the Northern Hemisphere, when the clocks move forward and we gain an hour of sleep opportunity time, rates of heart attacks plummet the day after. A similar rise-and-fall relationship can be seen with the number of traffic accidents, proving that the brain, by way of attention lapses and microsleeps, is just as sensitive as the heart to very small perturbations of sleep. Most people think nothing of losing an hour of sleep for a single night, believing it to be trivial and inconsequential. It is anything but.

Like we all sync our watches every year, at the start and at the end of daylight saving time, we also need to sync our relationships once in a while.

Finally there came a crisp blue afternoon, a Sunday, the day after Daylight Saving ended, when they met at the park at three o’clock and hit for so long that the light began to fail. Pip was in an absolute groove with her forehand, Jason was bounding around and achieving his own personal-best low error rate, and although her elbow had begun to ache she wanted never to stop. They had impossibly long rallies, back and forth, whack and whack, rallies so long that she was giggling with happiness by the end of them. The sun went down, the air was deliciously cool, and they kept hitting. The ball bouncing up in a low arc, her eyes latching on to it, being sure to see it, just see it, not think, and her body doing the rest without being asked to. That instant of connecting, the satisfaction of reversing the ball’s inertia, the sweetness of the sweet spot. For the first time since her early days at Los Volcanes she was experiencing perfect contentment. Yes, a kind of heaven: long rallies on an autumn evening, the exercise of skill in light still good enough to hit by, the faithful pock of a tennis ball. It was enough.

And it wasn’t just Josh’s body. It was him. There wasn’t anything about him I didn’t like. I wished there were. He was easygoing and funny. My moods didn’t scare him. He just kind of shrugged them off. He was down for anything. We hated all the same stuff—artsy indie movies with endings that didn’t have any closure, pineapple on pizza, daylight savings time. Sometimes he said something right as I was going to say it, like our brains worked on the same wavelength. Every day I searched for some fatal flaw so I could stop having these feelings. Sometimes I purposely grilled him on things, just to see if his answers would irritate me. It never worked.