How much night is too much night?

Yet even I have discovered in the past few weeks that sometimes you can get too much of a good thing, and night is no exception to this. There is a certain inherent peacefulness to the night, but there are certain things that you just can’t do, or at least can’t do with acceptable efficiency, while at the same time having to either carry around or find a good place to set the lantern that illuminates your activities. There are times when the thought of having to complete all tasks of this sort by six-o-clock or even earlier can be daunting, even to the point of being depressing.

This realization, of course, was quite a surprise. Back in 2012, I completely abandoned the use of light fixtures, relying entirely on a lantern for lighting when at home after dark – and I did this in the darkest months of the year. This problem that I noticed now of having too much night never cropped up then. So why would I have such a problem now.

One reason that occurred to me is that I now live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – which is much farther north than Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where I lived back in 2012, and as such, farther from the equator. A lot of things change when you move further from the equator – but one of those is that the annual fluctuation between the length of the day and the length of the night becomes more extreme. This means that in the late spring and early summer in Philadelphia, we have many more hours of sunlight than in Oak Ridge – but in late autumn and early winter, we have fewer hours of light and more hours of darkness.

The upshot of all this is that the scarcity of natural daylight hours that I deal with this time of year in Philadelphia is something that I never encountered back in Oak Ridge.

My therapist, upon hearing this, also pointed something else out. One advantage that I get from having less light at night is that it puts me more in tune with the natural cycle of day and night which we, as human beings, evolved with. However, he also points out that humans, being a primate genus, evolved in the tropics. Even the annual fluctuation of light and darkness that I experienced in East Tennessee was at a level that very few prehistoric humans would have experienced. The fluctuation that I experience here in Philadelphia is surely beyond what humans evolved to live with.

All this puts me at a dilemma. On one hand, I relish the experiencing the actual presence of night, and therefore don’t want to join all the many people who avoid it altogether. On the other hand, I accept that there are times of the year when there are more hours of night than are suitable even for the likes of me. How do I navigate this conflict?

For this purpose, I am experimenting with a concept that I call “expanding the dusk”. On days that are just too short for me, instead of going completely into night-mode the moment it is night-time outside, I can go into a stage that starts out fully illuminated, but during which I gradually dim my light fixtures and finally turn them off. The plan is that this will culminate in the last few hours of my evening with me experiencing the night indoors just as it is night outdoors, using my LED lantern to illuminate the few activities that remain for the day.

This way, I will still be able to truly experience the presence of the night without having to be crippled by having too many hours of it.

Of course, one might argue that there is something that I will be losing by making this change. I will still, unlike most people, be experiencing night without illuminating out of my presence whatever I can’t sleep through. But I will be experiencing a night that begins when I deem suitable rather than when nature dictates. As such, I am to some extent losing touch with a natural cycle.

However, I see nothing to apologize for in this. I try to connect to nature where I can, but make no apologies for not doing so where nature would overwhelm me. For example, with the value that I place on such connectedness, you would think that I’d be big on camping. Truth is, I avoid camping whenever I can (which for the past years has meant that I avoid it entirely). Why? While it may be a thrilling way for some people to connect to nature – with my strange combination of allergies and other conditions, it is instead for me a form of inhumane torture.

So I make no apology for my avoidance of camping – and I certainly don’t waste time and energy agonizing about how I miss out on that opportunity to connect with nature. Likewise, I try to be in tune with the natural cycle of day and night to the extent possible – but if in certain times of the year the night is just too long, I am not about to apologize for giving myself a slight artificially illuminated extension of the daytime.