1,440 Minutes (less 60)
“You’ve always had the power my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself.”
If you are like most of the world (or at least most of the American world), you are 15 minutes away from your perfect life.
Somewhere in the compost pile of my brain (under the memory of fluoroscope as an early x-ray and its chemically-green images that I pulled out for my students today) lies the results of a survey I read in Ms. magazine or Cosmopolitan or Good Housekeeping: women’s lives would be vastly improved if they had 24 hours and 15 minutes each day. Survey respondents said that the extra 15 minutes would allow them to complete their regular 24 hours of responsibilities and take luxurious bubble baths or read books or write or exercise or nap or…you get it.
With just 15 minutes more each day, women would be able to live the lives the 24 hour day simply could not afford.
I am not here to argue with that logic, but I am here to suggest a compromise: what if I offered you 4 minutes each day for the year? What would you do with that?
As this year is a leap year, we have one extra day in which to get things done in 2024. That's 24 hours or 1440 minutes. Divide that by 365 and we get about 4 minutes more this year than last year or than next year.
We have 4 minutes more each day of 2024 to create our perfect lives.
Now before you get all mathy on me, I know the leap year doesn’t really work like this (my students already told me), and I don’t really have 4 more minutes each day this year. And I know that daylight savings time arrives this weekend and drains a precious hour from our weekend, but that happens every year,, so we are still ahead of game.
But I also know that you, like Dorothy, have always had an extra 4 minutes in your day. So, now that you see them, what will you do with them?
Can you intentionally spend 4 minutes of your day everyday on something that you wanted to do last year but could not fit into your day?
I’ve set a 4-minute timer on my phone to encourage myself to set boundaries around 4 minutes each day to use the time to do something I have told myself that I do not have time to do--meditate, write a daily gratitude, sit down with a cup of tea, read a couple of pages in a particular book, wait in line, talk to a friend (or stranger), take a walk, rest my eyes.
Will 4 intentional minutes bring me a perfect life? No, but they will bring me a perfect 4 minutes. Every day.
