Time to Move Your Clocks Back on Nov. 6

Daylight saving time ends on Saturday night November 6 at midnight. I sure wish that we could really “save time”. Time has always weighted heavily on my shoulders as I never seem to have enough time! I usually wait till the end of the year to write something about time, but this year, Barbara, an old neighbor of mine from Ohio, pointed out that she had moved away from Ohio and then returned after six years to the same place, only to discover that it was just not the same anymore. And in my blog on “Retracing Your Steps”, I pointed out how much the scenery had changed in just one week around Canandaigua Lake. It’s that old culprit: time.

How many of you have experienced a relationship which broke apart and but then rekindled at a later time only to find that things had changed and the relationship just wasn’t the same anymore? Once again, time has a way of changing all of us even if we don’t recognize it!

I love to take pictures of scenes here in the Finger Lakes region as those same scenes change daily, even hourly depending upon the time of day, the clouds in the sky, or the subtle changes in lighting. We all struggle with time. And yet it is this struggle that brings us new opportunities and challenges as nothing stays the same.

I’ve tried to manage time when I was working, but only discovered that trying to control ones time just doesn’t work very well. And trying to plan or “engineer the future” was an exercise in futility as we have difficulty enough just to deal with the present. And how many hours have I agonized over tests in which I didn’t score well in, or conversations in which I didn’t say the right thing, or over decisions that I wished that I hadn’t made? Worrying about events in the past is a complete waste of time. “What’s happened is over and done with” as my Mother used to say.

So how do you deal with time? To me, time is continuous, always moving forward, never stopping, and certainly never going in the backward direction. It’s better if we concentrate on the present and not worry too much about the past or the future. This coming weekend we have a unique event: one extra hour of time between midnight Saturday and midnight Sunday. How will you use it?