Last year, the Senate voted unanimously to make Daylight Saving Time permanent, ending the practice of changing the clock twice per year with a bipartisan bill entitled the Sunshine Protection Act. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, apparently not for the first time: “Americans want more sunshine and less depression.” Amen!

Last weekend, we all turned our clocks back an hour nevertheless.

There’s a whole essay in here about American political dysfunction. Hundreds of words could be written about the bizarre notion that an action supported by around three-quarters of the population could pass one house of the legislature unanimously and die with no action taken in the other.

There’s something else that could be said about the changing of the seasons and the Church calendar, about the darkness setting in as we prepare for Advent to begin, about the ten bridesmaids keeping watch through the night, who need to “keep their lamps trimmed and burning,” preparing for the unexpected coming of the Lord. But that’s this Sunday Gospel, and there will be time on Sunday for that.

Today, I’m struck instead by Senator Murray’s words. Because if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that “Americans want more sunshine and less depression.” But it’s probably worth recognizing that this is something that none of us—not even our members of Congress!—have the power to give.

Daylight Saving Time is, after all, an illusion, a purely social convention. The Sun’s internal processes of nuclear fusion are unaffected by the filibuster. The angle at which the Earth rotates on its axis cannot be shifted by even our most dignified politicians. Daylight Saving Time, in its whole history, has not saved a single hour of daylight; nor would the Sunshine Protection Act have given us any more sunshine.

There are very good reasons to think we ought to shift our clocks one way or the other, relative to the status quo. But “more sunshine” simply can’t be one of them! The amount of sunshine during evening rush hour is within our capacity to change, in a world in which our schedules follow clocks set by human hands. The amount of sunshine is not.

Am I just being pedantic? No! (Well, maybe.) I think there’s an actual lesson here.

In many, many ways, we cannot change the circumstances of our lives. There are some things we can change, of course, and we should change them. But there are other things that are simply not within our power to control. The past. The people around us. The number of hours of sunshine in a day.

But while we can’t control these things, we do have some measure of control over the way we respond to them. We can’t change the things that have happened to us in the past; but we can try to change how we relate to our memories of them. We can’t control how the most frustrating people in our lives act, as much as we might like to change them; but we do have some control over how we respond, and we’ll be more successful in changing that. We cannot, by legislation or by prayer, add a single minute’s sunshine to the day. (We seemingly can’t even follow through on deciding not to change our clocks!) But we can do what we can do in the face of the unchangeable: Take that walk outside at lunchtime, make that soup recipe you’ve been eyeing for dinner, buy a coffee-table book on the Danish art of hygge that you’ll probably never read. There is no way to make the sun shine more; we cannot save daylight after all. But maybe we can change the way we enjoy it, instead.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.