Falling Back or Springing Forward?

I enjoy falling back every year. That extra hour is always a Godsend. More time to fold the laundry and unload the dishwasher and put the recyclables in the bin in the alley and mop the kitchen floor and write my Sunday School lesson and still be only 5 minutes late for the choir warm up at 9:15 am.

I love falling back in time.

I often wish that I could turn back the clock on a particularly busy day and have more time to get more things done. Sometimes, I fantasize about being able to do this over and over again until I am caught up with all my obligations. I realize that this is a selfish wish, a solipsistic fantasy. There are many people in the world who wish time would go faster because they are in prison, or poor or being assaulted or…. For many reasons, for many people, rewinding the day an indeterminate number of times would be a version of hell. I once expressed to a friend at church my yearning to be cloned so that I had time to do everything I needed to do. She looked at me over her glasses and said, “Or you could just do less.” That was a new thought for me.

Sometimes I make lists of all the things I have to do that I wish I didn’t have to do. Please tell me that I don’t remind you of an Andy Rooney segment on 60 Minutes, where he sits at his desk, surrounded by milk cartons, whining about why there are so many percentages involved in milk these days.

The desire to be able to turn back time to get more done is symptomatic of lots of things, none of them particularly positive.

1. Works righteousness, for one thing.
2. For another, it’s a sign I haven’t heard a word Jesus was saying in his proverb “Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.” No, I want a longer day so I can pack more trouble into it! I want 2 more days each week. I want 4 more hours in each day. I want another month between December and January with 31 days in it. I even have a name picked out. It would be called the month of Remember.  That has a nice ring to it. I want an additional month of summer. I haven’t yet decided what to call it. When I do the math that is one more month at Christmas, one more month of summer, the additional 4 hours a day adds up to 2 more months, the extra 2 days each week add up to about 3 months. So I’m saying I want seven more months in every year. That’s beginning to sound a little dysfunctional, even to me. At the very least it sounds greedy.
3. The desire to turn back time is probably also a sign of elitist privilege. People who are not materially comfortable and who don’t have a degree of destiny control don’t have the luxury of achievable ambitions.
4. It’s also a sign of poor time management since I’ve just spent time on this fantasy about not having enough time. How am I ever going to spring forward if I keep falling back?