11-01-2023

1 minute = the time I allow my coffee to bloom.
A box of 40 coffee filters = 35 days of morning cups of coffee and 5 occasional second cups.
A box of 20 Sleepytime Tea bags = 20 nights.
5 minutes = the time lost looking for keys, or shoes or computer or my mind.
10 minutes = the amount of time trying to answer the question, “why did I come into this room?”

How long is the average stop light?
How much life do you gain by driving 75MPH instead of 25?
Are you wasting time by chatting with the waitstaff, someone at the bus stop?
If you follow the advice of, ”Be here now,”
What happens to your past?
What happens to all the things you have learned and know?
That can’t be what they mean…
You can’t be here now without all the seconds, cups of coffee, breaths, heartbeats, that came before now.
You are indebted to them all
every minoot bit of before
as led up to now.
It’s rude to ignore that.

The coffee filters pass into the compost bin
the compost bin goes to the processor
and comes back a zucchini and green beans from Jeanna’s garden
Every day is fertilizer for the next.

What an absurd thing time is –
a device to keep track of how long to boil an egg.
All that complex technology that replaces our internal clocks.
Days and seasons, obviously dictated life,
But before clocks, did people think in seconds?
60 seconds to bring my coffee to perfection…
Shouldn’t I be able to tell by the smell or color or the change in texture of the grounds?
Why 60 seconds and not 59 or 61?
What difference can one second make? How about 5 seconds? 15 seconds is ¼ of a minute.
In a microwave those tiny increments make the difference between rock-hard ice cream and mushy sweet stuff.

My kitchen becomes instantaneously cluttered with dishes
The compost pot fills up and goes bad in 30 seconds
The garbage cans go out today. Already?!
The oven takes 7 hours to pre-heat
The stop light takes 30 minutes to release its string of cars.
A movie can take 90 minutes to span generations
by skipping over trips to the bathroom and eating breakfast.
We skip over these things every day.
How many times did you pee last week?

We seem to spend time—
Spend?
Is time money?
If we drive to the store at 75MPH to save time,
where did that saved time accrue? What is the interest rate?
At what point in human history did the concept of ‘keeping time’ or ‘saving time’ or ‘spending time’ come up? Time just is. It is not a cash crop, there are no banks full of precious time.

One coffee bean per day for 70 years equals 25,550 coffee beans.

1 That is a lot of coffee.

2 I am not going to count the number of beans I use to make my daily cup of coffee.

Imagining 25,550 coffee beans stretches the imagination.
25,550 days? incomprehensible.
What is the point in counting them?

Time is short.
Can it be tall? Fat? Thin?
Is it a super-model or a circus clown?

Time is running out.
Is it training for the Olympic track and field team?
Is it warm, sudsy water draining out of the bath?

time flies like an arrow
fruit flies like bananas
time flies are the seconds of our lives buzzing against closed windows
fruit flies when you toss it into the compost bin

How many coffee beans have I wasted by counting coffee beans?

And soon enough time is up.
down?
sideways?