Daylight is adding up, about three minutes more each day as March progresses, give or take. Tomorrow, we bank a full hour at once: Change your clocks, change your smoke detector batteries, start planning menus around tender lettuces. Spring hasn’t arrived yet, but her plane’s definitely left the ground.
I call this time of year The Great Thaw, or sometimes The Great Unclenching. Despite winter’s cozy associations with holiday gathering, with mugs of cocoa enjoyed before the blazing hearth, it’s always felt to me like a time of contraction, of hoarding. We button and zip ourselves up into ourselves and move quickly past one another. We sleep more and default to indoors. The days are always ending again.
When the light returns, something unclenches in me, and I like to imagine that it does in all of us, although I know better than to impute my own longing for the warmer months to the bewildering characters who prefer the cold. “Daylight Saving Time Begins.” That entry on the calendar always reads like a triumphant return, a welcome back. We tried this “standard time” thing all winter, tried being measured and responsible with how we spent our time, and now, exhale, finally, that’s over. Now, we will loosen up. Now we will stop being so withholding and rigid with our time, with our presence, with our imaginations. Now a perfectly good Saturday plan is just to meet up outside and see what develops. The season of scarcity is coming to a close and now we will spend ourselves with abandon.
Whether or not you feel a sort of inner unleashing happening this time of year, opening up is a seductive prospect, isn’t it? If there’s a tension between the seasons — fall and winter’s contraction vs. spring and summer’s expansion — then there’s a similar tension in us. Being timid vs. living out loud. Rushing in from the cold vs. lingering. Playing it safe vs. risking it. Keeping ourselves small and contained vs. letting loose our full splendor. Sometimes we need inducements to be our most expansive selves, an invitation to open up.
Let tomorrow’s onset of longer, brighter days serve as that invitation. Why not? We change the clocks by an hour, making this deliberate shift from dark to light in our external worlds. How can we do this internally as well? How will we meet this unofficial beginning of the lighter, looser half of the year? How will we thaw out, unclench, let go?
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🎬 “Mickey 17” (out now): The latest effort from the Oscar-winning “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho features Robert Pattinson as Mickey, a hapless man working on a spaceship as its “Expendable” — an experimental guinea pig who is repeatedly killed and reborn in the name of expedition research. Our critic Manohla Dargis calls it “a movie that teeters close to apocalyptic despair,” but also one that “lifts you to the skies.”
RECIPE OF THE WEEK
Sweet and Sour Cauliflower
To match the imminent sunshine with bright, vegetable-full fare, Hetty Lui McKinnon’s sweet and sour cauliflower is an excellent choice. A vegetarian riff on sweet and sour dishes at Chinese American restaurants, cauliflower stands in for the usual chicken or pork. The secret to the brick red sauce is ketchup, which provides some necessary sweetness tempered by vinegar, soy sauce and garlic. It will bring the sunshine into your kitchen, too.
Click here to read this weekend’s issue of T, The Times’s style magazine.
REAL ESTATE
Manchester United vs. Arsenal, Premier League soccer: Arsenal holds the No. 2 spot in the Premier League standings, but the club had struggled recently: Before this week, it had failed to score a goal in three of its previous four matches. Thankfully, for fans, it got back on track Tuesday with a 7-1 rout of the Dutch club PSV. Manchester United is not having a great season, though anything can happen in a rivalry match; last time these two played, in January, United won in a penalty shootout. Sunday at 12:30 p.m. Eastern on NBC
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