The night there is the dawn here, and the afternoon somewhere else
When I was a kid, time zones were like a robotic exercise, memorized from textbooks. Sure, I got it in my head, but they always felt alien in real life 🌏.
It’s been over 40 years since Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan looked down on the moon’s surface from lunar orbit, yet real life seems to exist outside such cosmic tales and scientific logic. The reason we couldn’t draw the International Date Line cleanly at longitude 180 degrees was probably more about the lives of the people in the Anadyr region than pure science.
A few winters ago, while crossing the date line heading to Australia, I lost Christmas Eve. I boarded the plane in San Francisco on the 23rd and landed in Sydney on the 25th. In my 2015, Christmas Eve disappeared without a trace, like the Tower of Babel. It felt unfair 😢.
‘Who needs a Christmas Eve every now and then, anyway?’
No one can say that lightly, because unlike a girlfriend or an umbrella, missing Christmas Eve is a rare experience.
No shepherd herding sheep all day in the Luberon mountains needs to move an hour forward, and no Venetian moneylender skips the last day of the year to welcome the new one. At least, since humankind’s inception, the Earth’s rotation hasn’t significantly disrupted people’s lives.
But nowadays, for various reasons, we can’t ignore time zone changes or date shifts. The world has changed that way. It’s a hassle to adjust to time zones every time I move, but at the same time, some people are lucky enough not to have to worry about it because they’re in the same time zone.
Life is complex, but thinking about how losing and gaining always balance out makes my heart feel lighter 💖.
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