Minutes

Doing that thing this morning where you set your alarm because you know you have to get up early and then your need for nine more minutes of sleep overrides your good sense and you hit snooze because there's a part of your brain that's juuuust awake enough to rationalize "No, I can totally get everything done and out the door in time even if I don't get up right now, despite the fact that I timed the morning to the minute" which you will only realize is completely untrue AFTER you finally get up. Stupid, lying, sneaky brain. So then you get up and you have a bajillion things to do before you can get out the door -- coffee, clothes, shower, hair, food, computer -- and you sit down at the computer and get sucked into a photography website where you find yourself looking at photos of celebrities taken by a photographer who has become a celebrity and thinking, "Boy, some of these celebrities sure are attractive" and "how is this guy a famous photographer? I could take these pictures" and you scroll and you scroll and you're scrolling the minutes away and then you realize HOLY CRAP I AM RUNNING OUT OF MINUTES HERE and that, unlike running out of minutes on a phone plan, life minutes are minutes you never get back but, also unlike minutes on a phone plan, you have never once bitched about "wasting" minutes of your life the way you do the minutes on your phone, though the minutes in your life are worth infinitely more and are equally limited. First that strikes you as funny -- not teeheehee funny, but interesting funny -- and then it strikes you as sad because people are more invested in the minutes they're paying for out of pocket than the ones they pay for with their hearts and minds, when it seems it should really be the other way around. You have seven minutes left to finish a blog post and brush your teeth before you have to get in the car and go to work but you take time to think, am I enjoying these minutes? Am I enjoying, appreciating, noticing the minutes as they pass? Or am I spending them in negativity, only focusing on the things that use the minutes sadly, stressed out, and in grumpy, sad space? And you realize that, even if you can't spend all of the minutes of your life doing amazing things, you can spend them making the average amazing, and be a person who finds joy in regular living, and that's not a bad notion to have in the space of a busy, oversleeping morning. Not a bad notion at all. You sip your coffee and sit back, pleased. You should write a contract for yourself, you think, like a phone contract, where you vow not to let your minutes slip past you. And then you think, maybe I just did.