When I've waited for a medical test result, for the pain to ease, for a particular phone call, for the appearance of a loved one, for a service representative to appear, or for the end of an exercise class, it can seem like every five minutes is forever. When they took the clock out of the health club exercise room I had to quit; I couldn’t handle not knowing when the class would end. Actually, when I found myself asking God to end the class, I felt guilty. You can ask God to end a sermon in temple, but not an exercise class—especially if it is held on a Sabbath morning.
Minutes seem to pass slowly in timed events, such as lectures and venues with bad entertainers. Those are the places where you check your watch or your cell every five minutes as you curse yourself for sitting up front. Five minutes of an embarrassing encounter can ruin one’s self-esteem. I walked into the men’s bathroom once. Lucky, a man was walking out.
Don't ever volunteer to take a five minute survey. You will end up with page after page until you’re sure it will never end. Speaking of pollsters, they attack you everywhere, online, on the phone, in the store, on the street. “Please evaluate the last person who talked to you.” I would if I understood her Spanish instructions. “Can you spare five minutes of your time to answer a few questions about the soap you just bought?” I never got out of the store to try it. Who has time for this nonsense? I'm a busy retiree. Don't ask what I do all day, just note that I don't fill out surveys and opinion polls.
Pondering surveys woke me up during the night, because it got me to thinking that I trashed the survey from my son’s office. To hell with the others, but his I’d better do. Five minutes later—or was it 45?—I find it in the internet trash bin and fill it out.
If only my family and friends generally valued my opinion that much. All I get from them is a request to do housework, or “shut up and deal like a good mah jongg player,” or “I heard that advice ten times already--stop repeating everything!” Five minutes of praise instead would go a long way!
Then there are the multiple five minute increments that seem to whiz by way too fast. A visit with my grandchildren who live 2000 miles away went by so very fast. But the wait until the next time will seem like forever.
It only feels like five minutes ago that I fit into all the clothes in my closet, even after eating a dozen brownies. Today I could just make my jeans larger by putting big holes in them, and call it fashionable. Let’s not talk about diets, and how slow the minutes go by when you are trying to lose weight. All I think about is food for minutes and minutes and minutes.
Celebrations go by too fast, and tragedies linger too long. It should be the opposite.
We use five minutes a lot in conversations. How many times has someone said, “Give me five more minutes,” or “I'm five minutes away”? Then you know, depending on who it is, whether you just have time to put on your coat or whether you have time to watch a movie.
It feels like only five minutes ago that I was seven instead of seventy-seven. Those five minutes fled by too quickly. It feels like only yesterday I was a young vibrant girl planning a wedding, and dreaming of a new life with my love. Holding babies and grand babies were only five minutes away. Yet my body tells me something else. My hair is thinner and grey, my memory not as sharp, and my gait much slower. It scares me to think about how fast those years went by. I don’t as many more five minutes as I used to. I better spend them carefully.
Einstein's theory of special relativity says that time slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you move relative to something else. Approaching the speed of light, a person inside a spaceship would age much slower than his twin at home. Tesla, put me on your list of space travelers. My wrinkles and the deterioration of my mind needs to slow down.
Then again, I wouldn’t want to spend five minutes on a space ship without my friends and family. Loved ones make all the five minutes worthwhile!
