I live in Arizona, where we do not observe Daylight Savings Time; the Navajo Nation is the exception. I’ve been living and growing older in this state for the past 25 years. Here, at 56 years old, I can tell how my sense of things changes with the natural rhythm of the clock, even though any obvious seasonal changes are relatively minor here in the desert. Usually, in November, I start to become more acutely aware that the days are getting shorter, and initially, there’s a slight sense of loss that has me asking myself if I did everything I wanted to do during those months when my days were long. Then, only a few months later, I became aware of an afternoon brightness that hinted to my internal clock that the short days of winter were running out.

There’s a melancholy I feel over these lengthening days as it dawns on me again that I’m transitioning through another passing season. I ask myself, did I best utilize my long nights to accomplish those things that are best suited for darkness? As I mourn the long nights fading away, I can’t yet appreciate the longer days that are ahead. I do start becoming more aware of the need to make plans of how we’ll best use those 16 to 18 hours a day of sunlight that will be upon us. If we’re not careful, they’ll pass without our participation and a season will have been lost.

So what happens to someone who abruptly has to change the clock an entire hour forward or back? I can’t imagine how unsettling this is to one’s senses as I rather enjoy my circadian rhythm, having the luxury of transitioning with the seasons, in tune with the spin of the earth that dictates when the sun rises and sets. Take this photo above that I shot at about 5:30 in the morning: two weeks ago, the eastern sky was pitch black, while this morning, it’s a dark blue. In a couple of weeks, I suspect the glow of dawn will start coming on strong, but if it were time to slam the clock forward, I would simply be catapulted from a walk at night one day to walk in daylight the very next day.

Being in rhythm instead of having to suddenly leapfrog forward or back feels right as I’m getting older. When I was younger, I didn’t so much notice it as much as I muscled through the transition, but I was also a much more emotionally volatile, impetuous young man. Today, as I become so fully aware of how I transition with time, I have to say I feel it’s a luxury to allow the senses to subtly move with the natural cycle of time and that humanity will have to realize and change this archaic yet modern collective forcing of a population to abandon what will likely prove to be an important cycle we are supposed to be well-tuned to.