a
Daylight savings feels like humanity’s attempt to obtain some form of control over the inescapable, ever-present factor of time. And at the end of the day, all we are left with is a pointless practice of springing forward or falling back twice a year. As if life wasn’t complicated enough already, lets throw in yet another meaningless annoyance that can actually cause some real problems, primarily if you were to forget or never even become informed of the date and time of the next daylight savings shift. I understand that it provides us with more daylight, technically speaking–as in, it will get darker later in the day, or at least we will think that it will, while in reality we just switched the label, not the actual event. The god of time is present in all matters of life, every minute and moment is another reminder of this. Similar in how you can say a word too many times and it becomes meaningless noise, or semantic satiation, if you think about the passage and inner workings of time, things starts to feel a slight bit uncomfortable.

b
A glimmer of hope shines brighter than all the darkness of despair.

a
There is a certain moment that replays in my head randomly, without recall or question. This moment isn’t all that impactful–it doesn’t seem important by any measure of what substantial moments tend to look like. My car keys slam into my face, their sharp edges glancing my TV-illuminated cheek. There are several of us sitting around the front room, half stunned at what just happened, half-intrigued still by what’s playing out across the television screen. Loud words that I can’t remember exactly, something to the tune of, “Well, I’m not f****** hanging out with her ever again. What a tease.” Tsh! My car keys shoot from his hand, slapping against my face. There are certain stimulus inputs that when implemented, trigger intense emotional reactions–just like baking powder and vinegar in the popular elementary school volcano science project. Why are my keys hitting my face? The vinegar and powder mix, immediately burning hot–anger and frustration, disrespect–at this point the pain from keys divebombing my face is negligible, unnoticed as my attention turns to the thrower. I swear up and down to not give those keys freely again, I retaliate with words of my own, defending some girl I’ve never met and her choice not to give herself fully to the thrower that night. Part of me is steeply stunned, amazed that sexual desire–unknown, blinded, pointless, emotionless, directionless sexual desire–can make you forget that the only reason you went on that second date in the first place was because you asked to borrow my car keys.

b
I gained a different, and yet fruitful, understanding of the word ‘temporal’ yesterday. It can be crucial to perceive everything in the world around you in a temporal sense–how do things interact with and relate to time?

a
I saw someone’s post earlier, it said, “You know seasonal depression is real when you get a random day of 50 degrees in March and it feels like you just popped a molly.” And what a day it was yesterday–the sun was out, birds chirping–it was some sort of hopeful glimpse into the future. Maybe it is to hope against hope–after all, I do live in Utah. The end of March starts looking really ripe, like spring is about to explode into every plant and person alike. Then the first of April slams the door shut with three or four sheets of snow, temperatures of 27 degrees, and a withering thought of how spring might have come early.

b
There’s a book sitting on my desk called, “The Essential Nietzsche.” It sits at a medium thickness, nothing too intimidating like the phonebook-sized Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. And yet, while its size isn’t of major concern, its content may be. Almost as if I know that opening the pages of the book will start a new journey so intriguing and beguiling that the energy required to intake such information is really the intimidating part. The difference between wanting something and actually doing something is so narrow, and so quickly can one become the other. Why is it so hard to open the front cover? Here I literally mean the front cover of the book, but just as easily the “front cover” could be construed as any outset into any activity. And yet, even if I were to pick the book up for 5 minutes, reading only the first couple pages, the idea that it could turn into more than that both excites and scares. Am I prepared for such an undertaking? Is anyone ever actually prepared, truly prepared, for the outsets of their lives? Probably not, but it’s the space between the amount we know and the amount we need to know that we grow and flourish–overcoming one challenge into the next just to thrive in this zone of experiential discrepancy.