In one more week, we will “fall back” at the end of daylight saving time. The shifts to and from daylight saving time seem to be a bit easier than they were years ago, before we had devices that automatically made the switch. I use my phone as my alarm clock, so it will automatically adjust. My watch also adjusts without my input. We still have a time adjustment practice in our home, however. The clocks in the stove and microwave have to be set. And we have two antique mechanical clocks. The routine for mechanical clocks is different in the spring than in the fall. In the spring, we can move the hands forward one hour. In the fall, the easiest way to make the change is to stop the clocks for an hour. Because the clocks can only be moved forward, they would have to be run through 11 hours otherwise, and that is a lot of chiming.

The twice-each-year change is a reminder about how complex our understanding of time has become. How we set our clocks has become a political decision. In the spring of 2022, the US Senate unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act. The bill would have made daylight saving time permanent. Had it passed in the House of Representatives and been signed by the President, we would not be “falling back” anymore. The bill never made it to the floor of the House of Representatives, however. That’s right. A bill was so completely bipartisan that it received unanimous consent in the Senate, yet was blocked from even being debated in the House. Politics can be unpredictable and confusing.

Back in 2019, British Columbia held a referendum in which 93% of voters supported permanent daylight saving time. However, the referendum's implementation has been delayed to align with Washington State's time zone. Meanwhile, in neighboring Alberta, a similar referendum was defeated. Slightly more than half of the voters preferred the time changes. In Alberta, there was a fervent debate over which time should be made permanent. Some people voted against the referendum because they wanted permanent standard time instead of daylight saving time.

It doesn’t look like the debate will end soon despite evidence that the biennial changes contribute to increased accidents, lower productivity, and other problems.

The way we measure time is in itself confusing. There probably is a reason we have chosen to divide the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds, but I don’t know what it is. It seems like a digital system might work better. 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, 10 hours in a day. Maybe that wouldn’t be practical. Shifting to 20 hours a day might work better, and a digital system could be maintained.

That wouldn’t change the calendar, however. Like the 24-hour day and 60-minute hour, the months of the year are based on a base-12 system. Politics, however, was involved, so the months don’t all have the same number of days. The names of the months reveal a former time when there were ten months in the year. September comes from the Latin for seven, October from the Latin for 8, November from the Latin for 9, and December from the Latin for 10. Then there is the problem of leap year, which corrects the fact that a year is 365 1/4 days long, not 365 days.

The system is pretty confusing.

There are other calendars. The one most familiar is the one most commonly used. A lunar calendar has 13 months with 28 days each. That yields a 364-day year, and if followed, means the months rotate slowly around the seasons unless leap days are added.

The organization of our society depends on agreement on how to measure time. We need a shared calendar and a way to count time so we arrive at the same time for meetings. I know that today is Sunday and we will meet for worship at our church at 10 am. Other members of the church will show up at the right time on the right day. The fact that we use a base-seven system for days of the week has its roots in religion. The creation story at the beginning of the book of Genesis in the Bible presents a seven-day cycle: six days for work and one day for rest. If there are reasons for seven instead of six or eight, I do not know them. Seven is the way we’ve been telling the story for millennia.

We’ve kept the seven-day week, but many people work five days with two days off, and there are proposals to go to a four-day work week. Unlike in former times, when many states had blue laws, much business is conducted on Sundays. Many workers are required to keep retail businesses open on Sundays. The Post Office now delivers some packages on Sundays. Not everyone gets the same day off. Millions of people in our country work multiple jobs to make ends meet and don’t get many days off.

I am a morning person. As a result, I prefer standard time. Switching the clock means I can ride my bike earlier in the day. Although it also means it gets dark earlier, I tend to be winding down most evenings and don’t mind. As a morning person, I’ve enjoyed living on the western side of the continent as well. I can make a phone call to a colleague on the East Coast first thing in the morning for me and reach them at mid-morning. I am part of a group of people who live in four time zones who meet over Zoom once a week. The meetings begin and end three hours earlier for me than for those on the East Coast. I prefer to have them earlier. I used to teach in an online program that met from 9 am to noon Eastern time. That meant I had to start at 6 am in my time zone, but I finished the class by 9 am and had the rest of the day for my usual activities. It works for me to be retired in the Pacific time zone, but it probably would have worked equally well in any time zone.

I’m pretty sure I’ll remember to adjust the clocks next week. If I don’t, my phone and watch will keep me from showing up for church an hour early.