Spend Your Time Wisely
The reasoning behind the business of setting the clocks back an hour every autumn either convinces you or it doesn’t, what I’d like to bring up for discussion is the way these wayward minutes are delivered.
This method may be called the ‘One Fell Swoop’ method, the ‘Volume Purchase’ method, the ‘Single Bundle Delivery’ method.
In effect you are handed in the space of a single tick of the clock a full sixty minutes of new time for you to tinker around with.
It is delivered to you in the same manner that a block of ice in the old days might have been delivered to your driveway in the early summer.
However much you might have relished the thought of fashioning chips to cool your drinks in the heated months ahead, the reality is that no sooner do the delivery guys lift it down onto the ground than it starts to melt.
So it is with the free minutes of the autumn shift in timekeeping.
No one can argue with the efficiency of the delivery process, nor with the luxury of gaining an extra hour’s sleep in the chill dark of autumn, but as it is set up now, wastage of the product is almost guaranteed.
The hour given you gratis is a wonderful thing to look at from all angles — all yours and free to boot! — but simply taking the length of time needed to savor the sensation more or less guarantees that it is gone at the end of the gazing period.
To take another instance, it is as though a hundred Kansas City strip sirloins have been delivered to your front door.
Perhaps the deliveryman has mistaken your address for that of a famous steakhouse.
It is in any event a sweet mistake…until you take into account two key elements of this scenario: the steaks are not frozen and you have no freezer.
“Enjoy the steaks!” the friendly driver calls as he drives off, but it is clear to you that you will be able to relish only a few of these, no more. Your ability to consume them is badly outweighed by the size of the pile.
If only they came one every few days!
So it is with our free sixty minutes in the still dark of the autumn night.
Most of them will go to waste, slumbered away, however pleasantly, and soon be forgotten in the rush of everyday life.
How much more useful these minutes would be if you could parcel them out to those spots in your life story where you could really use a few moments of backwards shifting the time-space continuum.
There is no lack in the ordinary person’s life of circumstances when it would be useful – most useful! – to turn the clock back just a notch to right before the point that you did that thing, or expressed that interesting observation, or delivered that clever – oh so clever! – jest.
There are pitifully few take-backs or do-overs in the course of an individual’s life; they are left behind with much else at childhood’s end.
You do not for instance, having imagined for some reason that you have at a glance figured out the mechanics of the game of roulette at the local gambling casino — when in fact you cannot spell the word, nor have a clue as to what exactly is being bet upon, nor how you place the bet, nor how you actually win the bet, nor what the odds are either for or against this crackpot wager that you have placed and have invited all onlookers to observe — you do not I say have the opportunity to reverse course after the roll of the ball and take your money back from the table while you give the situation further thought.
You ‘just had a feeling,’ is what you intend to say when the gal from the local news station – or who’s to say? It might make even the national news — interviews you afterward on your remarkable win.
“No, I never played in my life,” you’ll explain. “But I sometimes get these feelings and, well, this was one of those times. That’s why I bet the house, the cars, the children’s education fund, the grocery budget for the next decade, the lunch money of any future grandchildren, and proposed a state of personal indentured servitude to cover the rest, all on the chance of the little metal ball landing on this certain number and certain color.”
You say again, getting the feeling that the humble phrase might be entering the culture, a meme as the young people say, “I just had a feeling.”
‘Local Man’s Feelings Earns Him Millions’ is what you picture the headline to say.
Now, how much better it would be at just that point when the ball stops rolling in that spinning circle thing, landing on the most opposite number and opposite color in the universe of whatever it was you bet upon, and the dreadful consequences of your foolishness start to gain traction upon your sorry soul and pick up a little speed, how much better it would be at that exact point to pull out a card on which you have electronically stored that free hour of backwards minutes awarded in early November, stick it in a machine somewhere if it has a chip and if not swipe it in the old manner, and go back in time three minutes or so.
At that moment you were just walking by the roulette table, completely unknowing as we have said as to what the damn thing even does, when the girl running the show with the sparkling eyes says, “care for a try? You look lucky tonight.”
And at that point, you do not say to yourself, “Well, she’s a professional, she ought to know lucky when she sees it.”
No. with your newfound minutes you say, “No thanks.” Or you might say, “No thanks, I don’t know what that thing does or even how to spell it.”
Now those are moments to be savored! Not slumbered away in a pleasant but generally unconscious state, but actually put to good use. Indeed, it has saved everything that you care about in life.
And so it goes through the year, instance after instance, we can all think of them.
Now, you want to spend those free moments of life judiciously, not, in other words, using a precious five minutes to go back in time to change your order from the halibut to the lasagna. This and other such lightweight fare are not the best use of your time.
A few occasions of this and reckoning up the toll such trivial matters exact upon your dwindling hour instills the lessons of budgeting and thoughtful use of your resources.
But you would likely spend a moment or two of your allotted hour after you have discovered, having made a bit of a big deal to the crowd in the backyard on the Fourth of July regarding the topic of this powerful, powerful firecracker to be set off at the very bottom of the yard safely away from any bystanders and now find that while you intended to bring back the match and leave the lit firecracker you have instead left the match and brought back the lit firecracker with you, right there in your hand, see it? right there in your hand, well, to go back in time to correct the matter is a perfectly acceptable use of your allotted minutes.
When at work you see a certain slavering or panting or drooling look in your vendor’s eye across the table as you pass over the contract you have just signed, you might spend a half minute or so of your free time giving one final review to the language, perhaps noting that due to a slip of the pen you have agreed to pay him $100,000 dollars instead of the $100 you had in mind.
If you walk into a theater performance and find that it is not some comfortable old standby like The Sound of Music that is being put on but a production that promises a radical reinterpretation of human relationships from the ground up and where it is clear that even the potted plants making up the scenery are going to be performing in the nude, you can avoid hurting anyone’s feelings by going back a few moments in time and buying tickets to another performance entirely at the box office.
In like manner the young man who, through a combination of woolly-headedness and a mixup of phone numbers finds that he has proposed to two women over the course of a single half hour and that he has been accepted by both, well, correcting that situation is an excellent use of your allotted minutes.
It will not however be all good.
There will no doubt be people who press their luck, and open their presentation to the Board of Directors at the Quarterly Sales Meeting with a showing of their personal efforts in the art of caricature, with each of the members of the Board as subjects.
Nothing malicious! Just an image of this one fellow who’s a little abrupt with his anger with steam coming out of his ears, and the COO who ordinarily dresses so demurely done up as a flapper from the ‘20s, twirling her pearls and all.
And so on.
Just to see what happens!
It is with chagrin and regret that the presenter plugs his card into the nearby machine to take time back a few minutes and get on with his real presentation only to find that he is out of minutes entirely, and like an overused debit card, his is being rejected.
But as mentioned, a few occasions like this will promote careful budgeting and a sense of where things really stand in the world.
So while that extra hour of sleep is appreciated, it is not as appreciated as if we were able to parcel out the component minutes through the upcoming year at our discretion. Scientists are no doubt working on the concept and will likely be rolling it out soon.
