Not falling back means time loop remains unclosed

I demand restitution. Where’s my hour?

In the traditional fall-back, spring-forward time change set up — you know, ol’ trusty that’s been effect for lo these 63 years — we lost an hour in the spring that we got back in the fall.

That was the social contract: you commit to feeling like you’re on cold medication for a week in March because you know a glorious extra hour of sleep will be returned to you in November. (Unless, of course, you have little kids, but look: we all make our choices.)

Well, that transaction, flawed as it was, isn’t happening this year. That hour you sacrificed to the sun gods in the spring? Gone. Not coming back. We’ve sprung forward and we shan’t be falling back — not in November, and (possibly) not ever. The scale shall remain unbalanced and the loop shall remain unclosed as Manitoba has adopted permanent daylight time.

That hour joins all those other hours of our lives we’ll never get back — which I guess, technically, is all of them. But you know what I mean. I’m talking about the “well, there’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back” hours. The hours lost to meetings that could have been emails and on emails that could have been inside thoughts. The hours wasted on bad movies and flight delays. The hours drained by scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

Don’t get me wrong, I love spending time in all formats. Wasting it, abusing it, thinking I have way more of it than I do — and sometimes way less.

You can’t really save time. No matter what you do or don’t do, it just keeps passing.

One time, when my niece was little, she turned to me and asked if time “ends,” a big question I think briefly broke both our brains for a second. I answered, “It doesn’t.”

What I didn’t tell her is that time seems to go by way faster when you’re a grown-up, because that felt like a slippery slope into the “also, all of us will be dead someday” conversation.

But time, as we learned during the pandemic especially, is a construct. It can’t be stopped or paused, but it’s elastic. Liminal. The rules and rhythms of our day — 9-to-5, lunch at noon, news at six — all of that is of our own invention. And if you’ve ever flown a great distance and experienced jet lag, then you understand how it feels to be a time traveller. This is also why any hour is happy hour in an airport.

The point is, we can manipulate time, as we did twice a year when we changed the clocks and as we will do this year by deciding not to.

I get why permanent daylight time was chosen over permanent standard time, even though standard time hews more closely to our circadian rhythms. We’re gaining some daylight in the evenings in winter and we’re not losing our luxuriously late sunsets in the summer.

But we’ll feel this alteration of time keenly in January, when the sun will rise in the hour of nine.

And maybe we’ll start bemoaning the lack of time change like we bemoaned changing the clocks, as kids scramble to school in darkness and the temperature struggles to rise from overnight low to daytime high.

Maybe, eventually, everything will start an hour later in the winter, which sort of puts us back where we started vis-a-vis daylight hours.

People will always find a thing to complain about, is what I’m saying. On the internet, people like to say “We are living in the worst/dumbest/darkest timeline” about cultural shifts or government decisions they don’t agree with. I guess we’ll see what our new marginally lighter timeline has in store for us.

Still, I think we are all entitled to one (1) extra hour to spend (or waste) how we choose.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com