Early one morning just after we returned our clocks to standard time, the eastern horizon from my kitchen window flared like a stirred fire. Just above these hot coals, pink clouds arranged themselves in the scalloped shapes you see on a sandy beach as the tide recedes.
A week earlier I would have missed this, having made my coffee in the dark and then bent over a screen in my study on the north side of the house when the first light arrived. Surprises like this are why I like changing the clocks twice each year.
Not everyone agrees, and every spring and fall there are howls of protest. “The practice is archaic!” we hear, and “Farmers never needed this kind of help in the first place.” “How does China manage with a single time zone for the whole country, while here a worker on the night shift loses an hour of pay in November and has to work overtime in March?”
I get it. I chafe when my flow is disrupted, but what about the sweet illusion of gaining an hour of light on one end of the day or the other? If it’s light we are actually grumbling about, the real issue is the tilt of the earth and our place on it. Unless we live in Ecuador or Gabon or Kiribati, our daylight shrinks or gains a little each day, depending on the time of year. Change is unavoidable.
“It’s the disruption!” you argue. Sure, but to me small disruptions are good when they make me see something I might have ordinarily missed, something beautiful that lifts the spirit like Wordsworth’s daffodils, or something interesting that reveals a strange truth.
Recently I was hiking a familiar trail with my wife, and we were startled by a sight up ahead. It was a tree leaning precariously across the trail, actually two trees, we discovered when we got close, and neither precarious nor leaning at all. They had been uprooted in a gust of wind, their fall arrested by a ridge on the other side of the trail and leaving enough clearance for a giraffe to pass safely under. To be honest, we couldn’t remember if they had been there the last time we walked that trail, back in the summer when the woods were green and tangled, the day hot and our eyes blurred with weariness.
Now everything was so vivid we had to stop to look. They had been healthy trees, one of them with roots still gripping a small boulder they had apparently grown around. Now on their side, these muscular roots looked like a crude setting for a rough gem. What force had made all this happen, what sounds when the roots popped free and the crowns hit the ridge! Oh, to have been there at the time.
Once I did see a tree fall. I was running on a hot and windless summer day with my son, our path a dirt road shaded by a lush canopy of limbs and leaves. Up ahead we watched a tree come down — matter-of-factly and almost without a sound — in a spot we were due to hit in about five seconds. We were talking and distracted and almost oblivious, but we must have said something as we picked our way through the mess. Mainly we continued our run, and only after we were safely home did we consider how random life can be with falling trees and how differently our lives might have turned out if we had started our run just a few seconds earlier.
If small disruptions are good for unveiling interesting truths, what about the major ones? I’m always a little skeptical when I hear someone bravely say after a personal disaster, “It was the best thing that ever happened to me.” Surviving a near-fatal accident or illness will open your eyes — I know; it has happened to me — and you will need the right words to assure others you are OK and still the same person. But “the best thing ever” is a major stretch, possibly one instance in a hundred, and even then “best…” sounds tortuously philosophical to me. Give me the small disruptions, please, the curious ones and the minor accidents that fill me with wonder and make me finally see something that has been there all along.
In a few weeks it will be dark again when I make the morning coffee, that early-morning hour gained by fall taken back by winter. There will be other disruptions to consider, tracks in the snow made by animals I’ll never see, the sigh of the wind high above in the hemlocks when I stop to tighten the straps of my snowshoes. And yes, a sunrise through the kitchen window one morning in February when our days begin gaining back some of the precious light that has been trickling away since June.
Jonathan Stableford is a retired educator. He lives in Strafford.