There is a difference between real time and how we perceive time (a watched pot will not boil, after all). Every night when I look at the work I need to do, I compound so much time that I convince myself that I need to apply to law school and re-mortgage my house by the end of the week.
When you are young, you think to yourself, “I don’t have enough time.” In about fifty years you’re going to be sitting at home wondering, “What am I going to do with all this time on my hands?” You’ll wonder what the big rush was. Right now, every minute seems precious.
It Only Takes A Minute to Change Your Life!, written in 1977 by Willie Jolley, promises, “a motivational and inspirational revolution that will show you how to release the power within you.” I don’t know what Mr. Jolley suggests, but there are a lot of ways to kill your time. Just look how much you could be getting done instead procrastinating:
It only takes a minute to prevent child abuse in California, apparently, and also to donate money to breast cancer. It only takes a minute to install the Patio Door with 4-Way Cat Flap, and you can even take it with you when you move! And it only takes a second to die, of course, if you’re lucky. It only takes a moment on the lips to be forever on the hips, but it takes three minutes a day to get rock hard abs.
I’ve found different doom-and-gloom stats on this, but smoking a cigarette may take eight, 10, 13, or 20 minutes off of your life. However, my friends who smoke say that it only takes about fifteen seconds, and that if you’re smoking a cigarette that burns faster, you have those fifteen seconds to play with, anyway.
For each minute of anaerobic activity, you prolong your life by one minute. Welcome to eternity, Sisyphus.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that you do any of these things. That’s not the point. There is no need to fix your life (or your cat flap) in sixty seconds. there’s still time left. Try to use it a little more joyously.
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October 20th, 2006 at 1:10 am
Why haven’t you guys gotten rid of the above “comment?” Aren’t you always talking about how you unintentionally delete real comments while going through and deleting spam?
October 20th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
All of our blogs save comments to the same database fil. Another DP blog was getting a ton of spam, so whenever its spam was cleared, some legitimate comments from The Spin were accidentally wiped out. We’ve just disabled comments in that other blog, which will presumably reduce the amount of spam and decrease the chance of accidental comment deletion.