What a Week: Darkness and Silence

 

This week went smoother and faster than any previous week this semester. Now I’m not saying that this was entirely a derivative of my newly adopted sustainable behavior, but it certainly was a factor.  For me, the ease came with the simplicity. I only changed two aspects to my daily routine and for some reason my life slid on by in the blink of an eye. See, for the past five days, I have been thoroughly turning off my lights in my room and have kept them off until 5pm everyday. In addition to that, I have been killing my fans at night.

This week went by impossibly fast for me. It started with a productive Monday and ended with a relaxing yet satisfying Friday. As for the sandwich of endeavors in between, I could not have been more successful. While my grades might not reflect admirable levels of academic diligence, I leaped milestones this week in route of picking up my grades. The beginning of the semester was riddled with adjustment problems to a number of separate issues and my grades certainly took the fall for it. After a monumental fall break, I jumped back on the horse. But after this week I believe my academic progress has been catapulted in the right direction. I scored perfect on both of my Statistics quizzes, received a B+ on my Art History midterm, studied beautifully for both of my film history discussions, and, lastly, drew and conceived of two brilliant designs for my job here at Lafayette as a graphic designer. I could not have succeeded more this week and I think I know why.

When you sleep in an environment with no light and no sound, the resulting depth of your sleep is immense. I don’t think I have ever slept better this semester. I was woken from a deep sleep softly every morning to the sound of my roommate making tea for himself. This newfound relaxing slumber is completely a result of less distracting light and sound that has probably been interrupting my sleeping cycle in evil ways this semester. What makes this revelation even more profound is that I’m using so much less energy than before. I feel so green and it makes me warm inside (might be a stretch but it makes me happy in a moral sense). The one problem I took away from this week was a lack of light during the day. While I have two windows in my room, both are blocked by trees so there isn’t a lot of natural light in here during the day. To address the article requirement for this paper, I researched recent innovations in the field of LED lighting, in hopes of discovering profoundly energy efficient Christmas lights. While I found no Christmas lights, I did find an interesting amount of information surrounding the development of energy efficient LED lighting. According to Martha Carney and Howard Wolfman, LED lights are paving the way for energy efficient lighting.  Their energy proficiency was proven in the article using multiple studies, including one analysis of a LED versus incandescent lighting within a storage warehouse in Indiana. The results, for me, were enough to convince me to consider making an investment in LED lights.

 

For more information:

http://ledsmagazine.com/features/10/6/5