DailyJim: The change in sunlight

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Thursday, April 4th, 2024. Today's going to be a little more lighthearted than yesterday. I want to talk about the change in sunlight.

So, right now I am going out to meet with a couple friends, and I think I was at the same place about the same time of day, maybe a month ago or a month and a half ago, and it was dark. Dark and right now the sun is still up and the sun is still up for another or it's still light at least for another hour and a half or more and it just reminds me of how.

Things change day by day and sometimes we don't even realize it so part of it's because we switched uh daylight savings time so the spring forward meaning we move the hour i think ahead one so in the spring so right now it would be yeah normally 5 30 p.m now it's 6 30 p.m, and so maybe that that's part of the reason why it's such a drastic change but i think just day by day things slowly become as we go towards uh the summer solstice more and more sunshine shine in the northern hemisphere i saw a graphic on maybe it was twitter because i still call it twitter or um threads perhaps and it was showing the earth rotating and how uh it would rotate between light and darkness and it sped it up really fast and it was showing from the north pole perspective and it showed that as it got closer and closer to the winter souls or winter Yeah, solstice.

It got darker and darker near the top. I mean, certain parts of the Arctic Circle, I don't know how far down it goes, but don't ever see light during those parts. And then obviously as it went back towards the summer solstice, there were parts up there that never saw darkness.

And this is something that has been so familiar to me for most of my life until I moved to East Africa. And in tanzania which is very close to the equator they have something called swahili time and swahili time means it's actually everything is shifted by six hours so what would be midnight here is sa sita there which is sa's hour and then sita is six um and then what we would consider consider 6 a.m. Is considered kind of zero for them or like the starting point. They don't say Sifuri is zero. They don't say Sifuri, but it's kind of like, they say Kumranbili, I think. So they say 12 at 6 a.m. Because that's when the sun typically rises near the equator. It typically rises, I believe, around 6 a.m. and goes down at 6 p.m. This is about 12 hours of sunshine and 12 hours of darkness every day it doesn't change much maybe it varies more i'm curious to look into it a little more but i think it's pretty oh pretty my lips did a little weird thing i think it's pretty accurate or pretty consistent at least.

And so living in a place like that, you know, sun comes up at, you know, our hour 6 a.m. and goes down at hour 6 p.m. And it's the same every day. So in a way, there's different things that change. There are seasons that change, but the amount of light doesn't change. But then if you go to a place like northern Norway, I had a friend who was from, I think, the tippy top of Norway. Hey, there are times when there is no sun. there are times when there is only sun. Same for actually my Tanzanian friend who lives in Sweden now. I believe it might have been a huge shock for him. It still is, maybe, even though he's been there, who knows, gosh, five, six, seven, ten years, who knows.

To experience something in a different way. So now if you want to talk about Ramadan, which is happening, from my understanding, you're not supposed to eat. If you're in Ramadan, you're not supposed to eat or drink water between sunup and sundown, which, you know, is probably a challenge if you're in Saudi Arabia. If you're in the middle, if you're on the equator, again, 6 a.m. To 6 p.m., so it's about 12 hours. But if you're in a place in northern Europe or anywhere near the Arctic Circle when this happens, because Ramadan is different months every time. It's not the same time each year, at least according to the calendar that most of us use. And then, I mean, sun up to sun down. I don't actually know how people handle this because it could be sun up to sun down. What if the sun doesn't go down?

What if the sun is always up? Then are you not like what are the rules and it just makes me reflect on how so many of our practices are based on our geography so much of our life is based on the geography of where we're at and to take ourselves into a different place which frankly back in the day was really hard i mean i'm talking back if you go back a hundred years there really weren't planes that would take people you go back 200 years there really weren't big boats that would travel so often across these places so like you go back i don't know how far back you have to go not that far to where humans were pretty limited we were pretty limited to our geography and now just, just having been a person that's traveled a lot and moved a lot i think i've been exposed to a lot lot of the frustrations and confusions and all those other feelings of, wait, what is going on here? That I think a lot of other people aren't used to. And I think, oh, this is interesting. So now that we're all on the internet interacting with each other, it can be really hard to remember that our geographical context really influences what's happening with us.

So even just, you know, they call it seasonal affect disorder i think which is you know being in a place where it's not sunny where the sunshine is quite limited in the winter in this specific season can really have an impact on people's mood and people's behaviors and decisions etc anyways that's kind of the end of the week reflection i'm going to have a beer and stop reflecting maybe reflect a little because Because I don't know if I ever stop. But I hope you all appreciate this episode. And look forward to talking to you all next week. Take care. Bye.