Who tells the sun?

Approaching our annual and surprisingly controversial springing up, I have a confession to make: I don’t care.

I have never felt I’ve lost an hour of sleep in the spring when clocks get set ahead nor gained one back in the autumn when the opposite occurs. I have never suffered jet lag, bus lag, auto lag, or any other kind of lag from traveling just one time zone away. (Traveling three or more in a day might make me a little woozy, but that’s short-lived.)

And anyway, for all the attention we pay to saving daylight, nobody tells the sun. It goes down every evening in Arizona, which does not observe the clock-changing convention, the same time it goes down in neighboring states that do. (Arizona and Hawaii do not observe Daylight Saving Time, nor do 125 of the 195 countries in the world.)

(Until 2006, Indiana observed DST by local option, so no one driving across that state in the summer ever knew what time it was. Possibly nobody ever wondered. The clock in my car never changed because I always forgot how to change it, so I never wondered. But no matter where I was, it always got dark inside my car the same time it did outside.)

I grew up to the mantra, “nobody ever dies from lack of sleep.” But now, in this Century, it seems common wisdom that even the slightest variation in one’s sleep routine will lead to a health catastrophe. So by all means, if this is you, be you.

But me? I still don’t care. And nobody tells the sun.

(In the U.S., DST begins at some wee hour of the morning on Sunday, March 12.)