Likelihood of Success

Dim days

No, nothing to do with politics.  Rather, the end of Daylight Savings Time.

I’ve mentioned before that I usually get melancholy when the days get shorter.  So here I am Sunday, driving back to New Jersey from the Norwalk Aquarium with the crew, yes, in the minivan, and it’s black out at 6 PM, and I start thinking morbid thoughts, really getting lower and lower, getting a catch in my throat about lost youth and — and —

All of a sudden I realize, it’s the first day of Standard Time!  The very first day experiencing the reality of photodeprivation and I’m already down in the mouth!

This realization, this moment of self-awareness, actually was helpful, because it enabled me to appreciate that I was merely responding to a stimulus (or perhaps the withdrawal of a stimulus?) and that there was no reason to be any more appalled about existence, vel non, than there was on the previously sunny day at that same exact time on the clock.

This does raise the somewhat troubling question, though, of just how sensitive we are to subtle and not-so-subtle changes to our environments, and how that affects not only our moods but our decision-making, our relationships with others, and everything else that ripples across the pool.  We go about as if we were masters of our own destiny when in all probability most of us are merely more or less aware of how our environments manipulate our inner magnets, but all are affected by them profoundly.