As “daylight saving time” has come to a close, meditations about the nature of time have raised some interesting perspectives to the surface of my consideration. Clearly, from the abounding opinions that wash up on the shore of the internet, I am NOT the only one that feels a bit “grumbly” about the yearly dance of “taking an hour” and “giving an hour” for some prescribed purpose. Many people question, “Why can’t we just leave it all alone?” Beyond daylight saving time, we also have that unusual 366th day every “leap year”…Why?

Well, in this age of “free range” information, it can easily be found that daylight savings time was fashioned to allow more use of daylight, while the leap year was orchestrated to “correct” the basic truth that the sun takes 365.242199 days to go around the sun, meaning that extra day every so often should “eat up” that mounding fraction of a day we keep sweeping under the rug. Honestly, both these derived adjustments have served their purpose (for our human purposes) as well as possible over the years, but are they the only, or best, solution?

When we consider the nature of time, and what it is, it’s possible to fall into an existentially philosophical trance! It’s candidly clear from direct experience and observation of the world around us that certain cycles of motion rhythmically move in rounds that can reasonably be depended on to uphold a certain continuum; the Earth spins to view the Sun rising and falling every “day,” the Moon grows and diminishes the same way every “month,” and the Earth completes a trip around the Sun every “year.” All these breakdowns are what I would sincerely term “real time.”

On the other hand (of the clock…much pun intended), we have, as a species defined time into smaller particles that we’ve termed seconds, minutes, and hours. (You know any minerals, plants, or animals [or planets or stars] subscribing to those units?) We’ve then extended these denominations to “fill” the cycle of a solar day. On the practical side, such a breakdown does make it most convenient to schedule and organize the events of a day for activities’ precision. Thinking back to the days of the good ole’ trusty sun dial, we might say, “Meet me at the market when the shadow’s at the bottom,” or something similar, but those instructions leave a larger window of estimation open for relative and imprecise interpretation, which we also know to be more difficult to follow on cloudy days, etc. So, alas, we adopted our static periods of time and have tried to plug nature into our system. Somewhere along the way though, we noticed that, “Hey, at 5pm a few months back, it was light outside, and now it’s dark at the same time…” We would also have noticed, prior to leap year if we’d left things alone, that the changing point in our seasons seemed to be creeping ever forward in one direction despite all our months remaining assigned the same “shelf space.” Therefore, we’ve adapted by implementing daylight saving time and the leap year to offset these natural fluctuations. However, this way of working things, in my opinion, is far from perfect…

We already looked at how the natural world’s rhythms of time are celestially “ordained” as the movements of the sky above are tracked from on Earth below. We shouldn’t forget that, just as all the heavenly bodies are a natural part of the world, so are we. Our body’s bio-rhythms are cyclically fluctuating with their own internal orders. Curiously, these internal rhythms will, allowed organic opportunity, sync up with the outer rhythms we observe. One powerful example can be found in women’s menstrual cycles, with their growth and shedding of the uterus walls, reflecting the growth and shrinking of the moon’s visibility. This, of course, is not as ”synced up” as it would have been during a time when artificial lights (and schedules) were not being navigated on such a continual basis. In the same way, we would most likely rise for the day’s activities upon sunrise and work to conclude our business around sunset if left to our own physicality’s programming.

Now, it has become quite a busy world, and people are burning “midnight oil” all over the place to keep up the pace of a globally-connected planet. In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with that. We don’t have to sleep just because the lights went out. However, arbitrarily setting the boundaries on when to “rewind” or “fast forward” the seasons a smidgeon, or when to give or take a dollop of light, subtly messes with our own organic attunement with nature.

It’s my speculation that it is a human compulsion to fit our life inside a fallacious system of time that is at the root a much of our ethereal discomforts in the world. If we’re all aching to dance with time to its own unique signature, but we’re all strong-armed into ignoring that frequency, it becomes a source of perpetual stress for us to “will” a different schedule on a regular basis.

Our own initiations and harvests are no longer paying homage to a new or full moon. Our daily habits follow the hours on the clock rather than the rising and falling of the day’s vital energy. The increase and decrease in temperature across solstices and equinoxes means little to us now who no longer sow and till the land; most of us work the same rhythms regardless of season. Surely, all of these compromises have a grinding effect on our inherent joy’s freedom.

So what could we do? How could it work differently? We can’t go backwards and just get up when we “feel” like it when deadlines have to be met on various projects. We can’t just stop making the present adjustments and let darkness roam into our day without notice, nor can we allow spring to slowly creep into winter. Such concessions would be equally aggravating for the world’s population. We have designed seconds, minutes, and hours, and we cannot do without them at this point it would seem…but must their definition be so “written in stone?”

What if we changed the timespan of these chronicled measurements in such a way that they were able to “fluctuate?” Behind such a proposition is the premise that TRUE “real time” is felt rather than measured anyways. Think about the nature of music, which is one arena where time’s effects and utilization can most palpably be sensed. A song can be sped up or slowed down, and certain parts within one can move in both directions. The rhythm behind a song varies, and it is the frequency with which the rhythms cycle that determine how we are moved along by it. Music is one medium through which “pockets” of time are created to be experienced via the artistically emotional sensibilities. The expansive and contracted potential of time can, in the realm of music, both be expressed alongside one another to engender a specific effect of resonance in the audience. Why not make our daily time “dance” to nature’s beat as well?

Aiding with such a consideration in our technologically driven, modern world is the fact that we could now (whereas in the past perhaps we couldn’t) easily program a time-keeping apparatus that could slow down or speed up the metronomic value of a second/minute/hour in accordance with the light and darkness, and/or warmth and chill, of a cycle. In such a way, we could collectively decide on a “formula” (integrated within nature) with which to pace time’s passing so that it more accurately matches natural rhythms.

Now, I know my whole concept may seem rather far-fetched, and quite possibly be well ahead of its time, so I certainly don’t have all the logistical “kinks” worked out necessarily, but the overall panorama of the idea’s “big picture” seems like one that could definitely be found worthy of further contemplation. This suggestion neither ascribes to keeping our fixed and static construct of time fastened to life, nor does it anarchically call for the obliteration of time altogether. What it does suggest is a rejuvenated way of defining our concept of time to more harmoniously match our internal attitude of order with the sense of order demonstrated all around us in the natural world.

With all criticisms temporarily suspended, I imagine such a revolutionary framework to function so that our daily 24 hour period world “stretch” these 24, newly defined, hours across a span of “true time” to equal one evenly-divided “slice” of that true and actual 365.21299 “day” period of a year. That would be the first step to dissolve the necessity of the leap year. As such, our new clocks would have to measure a frequency of time out to a smaller fraction-based percentage, but our technology is more than capable of this by now. Next, to get rid of the necessity for daylight saving time, the value of these newly defined increments of seconds, minutes, and hours would then need to be given allowance to “swell” and “deflate” slightly throughout the year as the amount of daylight increases and decreases. The day would still be 24 “hours” (although they may be less “neatly-rounded” hours due to equalizing the true length of a solar year), but those hours would also be spread out or condensed in accordance with how much light or darkness is occurring in a solar daily period. In this way, ALL 24 “hour” days would have a numerically equal share of daylight and nighttime “hours,” but depending on the season, the 12 hours of day or night may be felt and observed to pass slower or faster than those of other seasons. However, the adjustment of time’s swelling or contracting would be kept up with through our technology’s programming, so we’d all be on the same page with it at any and all times.

Ideally, this sort of shift would help put us back in touch with natural rhythms, while still allowing us a measured schedule through which to plan and organize events. I’m sure that such a newly adopted system would come with new challenges though. A couple issues I can sense off the cuff would be how an hourly rate for work might be determined when the span of time is constantly adjusting, or how to structure the length of time given over to a task when the span of that time is shifting as movement progresses. A couple solutions to these problems might be that an hourly wage could “slide” up or down along with the fluctuating elasticity of time to compensate. Another alternative might be that hours employed in action might simply shift slightly to reconcile the expanding or constricting tides of time’s inherent nature. Regardless, I believe that such troubleshooting to get us all in alignment with the natural occurring order of cosmic cycles would well be worth the innovativeness that such newly sprouted necessity might call forth.

In closing, don’t you think it’s about time that we started living in tune with everything in nature, rather than trying to make nature live in a fabricated matrix of artificial discord for us? Expecting the rhythms of the universe to fall in line with our own manmade constructs is truly one of the most egocentric endeavors humans have attempted to date. Once upon a time, it may have been necessary to figure out a “quick fix” for scheduling our affairs around life’s more messy reality, but the universe does not subscribe to a one size fits all solution for an eternity of changeless endurance. We, like life, must be willing to stretch and bend or else we are apt to harden and break…but how much “time” do we have left?