The Shortest Day!

I live in the winter wonderland that is Chicago. Today we “spring ahead”, switching to daylight savings time which has the effect of creating a 23 hour day, the shortest day of the year. Residents of this city are hoping the time change is heralding the arrival of spring. The winter has been long and cold. Winter lasts three months on the calendar however because of the continual onslaught of snow storms this season, the time seemed to pass very slowly.

What is interesting about time, that most singular of human inventions is that our minds and bodies do not care about some artificial fabrication of the industrial age, they create their own internal time. Stefan Klien wrote an interesting Op Ed piece in the NY Times:

The brain’s inclination to distort time is one reason we so often feel we have too little of it. One in three Americans feels rushed all the time, according to one survey. ..

…believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.

Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed…

… The misguided notion that time is money actually costs us money. And it costs us time. People in industrial nations lose more years from disability and premature death due to stress-related illnesses like heart disease and depression than from other ailments. In scrambling to use time to the hilt, we wind up with less of it.

The remedy is to liberate ourselves from Franklin’s equation. Time is not money but “the element in which we exist,” as Joyce Carol Oates put it … “We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.”

How would your guests describe the time spent in your restaurant? Was it a long laborious evening or a light, lively enjoyable event in which the time passed much too quickly?

You have a lot to do today and one less hour to do it in. Enjoy the Shortest Day!