The Snooze Button is a Lie

I know it's late. Or is it??

I went and saw "The Raven" at theatres and was successfully deterred from eating right afterwards. That's beside the point though. The point is I went and saw the Raven, and then I had some left over homemade pizza when my appetite returned, and as I was sitting down and eating a pepperoni, I realized that tivo was uploading onto the the Telly because (as I suspect) a certain dog must have hit the power switch on the power cord.

On the screen, there it was. "Almost there, just a few more minutes." And I looked at my phone and it said 9:11 (no joke, it really did). And I thought to myself, "alright, I bet it is working by 9:15. Just 4 minutes." But as I sat there, four minutes felt like forever. And then I thought that over a bit as the "almost there" slogan continued to taunt me on the screen.

Here's what went through my mind in those few minutes.

If you had four minutes to say goodbye to someone you'd see in an hour, that would be the longest goodbye. If you had four minutes to say goodbye to someone you'd never see again, that would be too small a time to say goodbye.

If you had four minutes to kiss a boy who you really disliked and who brought to mind lots of fowl words, that's four minutes of torture. But if you had four minutes to kiss the boy who brought to mind nothing, because he made you forget your words, then that's four minutes of heaven.

If you were told that in sixteen years, you'd be celebrating another birthday, you'd think nothing of it. No need to plan the cake now, that is forever away from now (40th birthday for me). But if you were told that in sixteen years, your family would be planning your funeral, you'd obsess over every single day knowing and honestly believing that sixteen years isn't enough time.

If you had one minute to grab your backpack and  meet some amigos at the library to study, you'd be walking. If you had one minute to grab your backpack and meet some professor in class for an exam that your alarm clock kind of forgot to wake you up for, you'd be running, screaming at your alarm clock, and praying for diving intervention.

Time is a funny thing. It really is.

I guess you could say I've under appreciated time, a couple of times...

I've squandered minutes, and hours, and days, and once a whole month. No joke, last October might not have even existed I spent so much time studying and not watching the clock.

We only count the seconds when it is convenient to us. When we want something now, a minute becomes an hour and we greedily count every passing second until our time has come. And when time is not in our hands, and it is not moving around our wants or our needs or out motives, we let it go unnoticed, and the seconds, and minutes, and hours, and days blur and disappear.

That's what makes time fast or slow. When "nothing" seemingly happens in our lives, we say time has moved slowly. When "everything" is happening in our lives, we say time moves too fast.

Maybe watching the clock, being aware of the time, that's what makes it go slower. Because it matters, it becomes something of significance. Four minutes to "waste" saying goodbye to someone is four minutes too much of your time, and so it goes by as you ramble and let the time go, but it goes by in slow motion, because you keep hoping it will speed up and move on faster as to convenience you. But Four minutes to say everything of worth to a person you'll never see again. You watch every second, the way it ticks, bends, what ever else a tick does...you'll notice it. You'll make every second count. And so it moves slowly as you watch it, but as it moves, it moves faster and faster because in your heart you want it stop, you want it to rewind, but in reality, it moves forward like it always has, and because it is against everything you want, it comes too fast.

We hold time, we hide time, we push it, we pull it, we manipulate it... that's all the snooze button is. It's just a button that was created to make you feel like you're cheating time, sleeping in, when in reality, you probably set it 30 minutes early. So in those thirty minutes when you should have just slept soundly and then woken up, you lost 30 minutes of real, quality sleep to feel like some kind of time god. congratulations.

The snooze button is a lie. If nothing else, remember that.

But, if you'd like something a bit more substantial, I guess the most obvious is that if you're wasting time because it isn't revolving around you, you might want to back up, rewind, and reconsider how your spending the seconds you have. Now, it seems irrelevant, but when those four minutes, or 16 years, or 1 minute are counting down to the last seconds, I'm sure in retrospect you'll either be thankful, or sad that it's over and you missed it.