Falling Back in October

Today was the first day of "daylight savings". I remember in school a teacher taught us a way to remember which way the clocks would change. "Fall back, spring foward." That's what she had said. And I still use it to this day. When I lived in Panama it was a no-daylight-savings zone. We were exempt from falling back or springing forward no matter what the rest of the world was doing. And why is it called daylight saving? What exactly am I saving? Time? Time for what? Each day I'm given 24 hours to spend. I wasn't aware of the fact that we even had an option of doing anything else but spend time. You can spend time with friends, waste someone elses time by showing up late to an appointment and you can also do things to pass time. You can do all sorts of things with time. Even if taking a short may "save" you time, you still have no choice but to spend that time doing some other task like spending more time at the place you took the short cut to.

Someone else once told me that the quickest way to get from point A to point B is via a straight line. My first day of public school in Miami sophomore year I would go home for lunch. My trip home consisted of taking various streets I was familiar with, it wasn't the shortest route. It wasn't a straight line. It would take me 15 minutes to walk home, I would have 10 minutes to eat and be sad and wishing I didn't have to return to that horrible place they called a school and then it would be 15 minutes to walk back to school. I would spend 30 minutes commuting back and forth from school. I was eventually informed about a short cut that would "save" me time when I told them my route. They laughed at me and said, "The quickest route between point A and B is a straight line."

Very true.