Time management – aaarrrggghhhh !

Time-zones are a mystery to me. When people go away on holiday, I can never figure out whether they are behind or in front, or even what day it might be. Otherwise I cope well with problems, but time just freaks me out. 

OK. So I have Aspergers and am a semi-feral  resident in my own time-zone most of the, er, time.

I haven’t worn a watch for about 18 months now. It was a conscious decision. When the battery ran out, it seemed like a good moment to jump ship and do without one. At first I found myself checking my wrist maybe twice a day. Now I never check and don’t miss having time on my hand.

And now it’s five to April and clock changing time. I hate changing the clocks. Backwards or forwards makes no difference. I just hate the change and it spooks me for days. Generally, it takes me a week to recover, to get a sense of where I am, temporally speaking.

Time is a problem for me. Geography, too. So in my head the space-time continuum is one heck of a mess.

Every year I tell myself (twice) that I will stick with the time I have, and not change the clocks. And sometimes I have managed that for a week, or at least until it drives other people nuts. It never works out.

But, even if I am part of the problem here, changing the clocks seems to make no difference at all. If you want different daylight hours, why not simply get up earlier or later to suit ? If farmers need the hours to be different in summer, why don’t they start earlier (or later) to do whatever they want to 
do cultivation-wise ?

If I want to cycle when it’s quiet, I go out early. If I want heat, I cycle in the middle of the day. The clock isn’t the chief issue. If hours of darkness are unsafe, well, travel earlier or later.

The logic seems to be that we can’t change time, but we can change perceptions of time. And it is changing those perceptions that is so discombobulating twice a year.

If changing the clocks makes any sense to anyone out there, well, explain it to me.