Health warning: Do not fritter!

Five or 10 minutes at a time, quarter of an hour here, half an hour there. Our most precious gift. Taken by stealth.

I was doing Stuff’s quiz, as I do every morning and afternoon. In itself a sad statement on my life. I look forward to the Stuff quiz. Perhaps I need therapy? Or a pet. Or a hobby. Or a partner. A pet I think. Because one of the Stuff questions said that a study has tallied the number of months of a driver’s life (insert your name) – that have been spent waiting for red lights to turn green. Three, six, 12 or 18? What do you think?

The answer is six. So of the 864 months I have been on the planet, six of them have been spent edging ever closer to the grave, at red lights. You can’t use the time productively like playing Wordle or checking emails –you are limited in how you use those empty moments.

Rhinotillexomania

You can choose from rhinotillexomania (picking your nose), suspiration (sighing), needlessly adjusting your manhood (selfexplanatory), or checking the precise origin of your borborygmus (intestinal gurgling). Each one of them useful but hardly fulfilling. You wouldn’t want to die in the process, you wouldn’t want it to be your last act on the planet. “Oh JB had a happy life and ended it with a flourish – his index finger up his nose and his large intestine rumbling. And at a red light.”

The traffic planners are playing God. They have stolen .694 per cent of my life from me while I have waited at red lights. I bet they sit watching me on CCTV, snickering as my time ebbs.

It takes about five minutes to do 15 Stuff multiple choice questions – 10 minutes out of my life every day. Ten minutes I don’t get back. Two-and-a-half days of my year. At age 72, I have already used my allotted three score years and 10…‘the days of our years’, according to the Bible.

I am clinging to any time I have in the bank. So should I really fritter two-a-half days each year scoring ‘nice try’ or ‘you can do better’ at Stuff trivia quizzes? “What about Waka Kotahi?” shrilled an outraged colleague and Katikati commuter. “Waka Kotahi, servants of the people, robbing us blind at the same time.” She refers to the 16.4km, 34-minute, commuter trip down State Highway 2 from Katikati to Tauranga that can involve staring up someone’s exhaust pipe for oneand-a-half hours.

So five return trips each week crawling or stopped dead. The lost time is something we can’t reclaim. So perhaps they could bill Waka Kotahi $35 an hour for all the fulsome enjoyment and happiness arbitrarily stripped from our lives while trying to negotiate State Highway 2?

The kettle

I am watching the kettle boil as I ponder all this. And when it whistles and turns off, I am reminded another three or four minutes of non-productive time has been cut off my life.

Do the math – four cups of Darjeeling a day, every day for a year. If I started boiling the kettle, as a serious tea drinker, aged 20, that’s nearly another seven months off my life….with nothing to show. Frittered on a trifle. Plus the time spent at red traffic lights.

Perhaps I should research constructive, productive, uplifting, rewarding activities waiting for a kettle to boil. For example – maybe I could pack my whole daily exercise routine into that four minutes. And now I’ve got Iron Maiden’s song ‘Wasted Years’ crashing round in my head.

“Now understand, Don’t waste your time always searching for those wasted years.”

I find Iron Maiden loud aggressive and mangled even when I’m just scribbling down their lyrics.

“Face up, make your stand….”

Realise you’re living in the golden years, hey!”

Hey yeah! Makes me wonder who else is fleecing me of my golden years? For one... the very person who swore the Hippocratic

Oath to uphold specific ethical standards to promote my longevity. The doctor – at $50$60 a consultation on how to best preserve or extend what time I have left. But I gobble up 30 to 40 minutes of it in the waiting room. That’s 2.6 hours a year of my life if I make four appointments. I could have seen a couple of movies, re-arranged my socks draw, taken a pumice to the callouses on my feet. Endless excitement and joy. But no – I was waiting and wasting.

Chop Suey

The Chinese say: “Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think”. Then in the same breath, the lovely lady at my favourite takeout – she does a sublime chop suey with a fistful of cashews – always says in her delightful way: “Ready 15”. Everyone has to “wait 15” regardless of what they order and how busy they are. No-one’s time is any more important than anyone else’s. I love that. I ‘chop suey’ once a week…so each year I commit $884 and 13 hours of what’s left of my life waiting on chop suey. So, I read the menu board, again, and watch other people read the menu board. Why? They have already ordered. It’s sucking up our lives.

Nailed it

Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kuble-Ross – she’s studied near-death, which at 72, puts me right in her study demographic. Elisabeth nailed it. “It’s only when we truly understand we have a limited time on earth, and have no way of knowing when our time is up, that we will begin to live each day to its fullest, as if it were the only one we had.”

There are no credits for waiting at red lights or watching the kettle boil. And it’s not that we have little time, but more that we waste a good deal of the time we do have. Or someone else does.

Thoughts? Email: hunter@thesun.co.nz bassist Steve https://interestingfacts.co.za/music/iron-maiden/