Daylight saving time is here again
By DANA DITTMAR
This is the one week out of the year I hate the most. The week we switch over to daylight saving time. Fall back, I can handle; that extra hour of sleep is divine. But losing an hour of precious sleep just seems cruel.
Dana Dittmar
Now, instead of getting up at 5:15 a.m., I’ll really be getting up at 4:15. Dressing in the dark was never my forte — imagine arriving at work with one black shoe and one navy blue shoe.
And is it just me, or do you have a hard time going to bed at 10 p.m. when your body says it’s only 9? It truly does take an entire week for me to adjust to the time difference. I do not understand how people can jet all over the country — and the world — and function with any common sense at all.
The one good thing about daylight saving time is it stays lighter longer in the evenings. Which means I can sit outside on my patio after dinner and still catch a gorgeous sunset. And even though we had a wonderful warm winter, now that it’s daylight longer, it seems all the neighbors are out walking around in the evenings as if they’ve experienced a rebirth.
So there are pros and cons to having to adjust to even the slightest difference in our lives. If adjusting to just one hour of time can wreak havoc in our lives, imagine what the big changes do to us.
Researchers will tell you the most stressful thing to endure is the death of a loved one, followed by critical illness, divorce, loss of a job and relocating. Yet, somehow we conjure up our bravery and strength and make it through these major changes. It’s the small things that often seem to overwhelm us.
Gutting my condo and completely remodeling it wasn’t easy, but I handled that. Changing my three-times-a-week walking path had me lost several times. One of our volunteers moved things around in the chamber lobby, and now I can’t find anything.
And yet, my buddy and fellow chamber member Jennifer McCafferty had her hip replaced a few days ago and is already walking around her house and sneaking out into her back yard. This was a huge change, and she barely blinked an eye.
The bottom line is, we will never be able to eliminate the stress of change in our lives. We just have to learn how to react to it in a way that isn’t harmful. Me? I’m going to beat this daylight saving thing one way or another. Maybe I’ll even learn to love getting up at 4:15 a.m.
