525,600 minutes - Make Minutes Matter
I have a tradition each year of taking a Christmas eve walk with a very close lifelong friend, we review the year and think about the year ahead. It's a time for reflection, to remember and generally catch up on all things. (We also always play cribbage, but that's another story!).
This blog title is a reference to Rent, the musical, and the title provides a great context for what sounds like an abundance of time in the year, but drilling down into it you quickly realise that it is so important to Make Minutes Matter. I've coined this phrase and I liken it to the classic "look after the pennies and the pounds with look after themselves". If I can enjoy the small time frames here and there across a year they add up to something significant. It's incredible how fast minutes can race by in a busy work or daily environment, a 10 minute alert before a call and before you've even blinked it's 1 minute left (literally happens nearly every day!).
I have a rule to be home from work for dinner time with my family, and on busy evenings where there's always only limited time to eat, play, bath, book and bed this really comes into its own. I know there are (endless and fun!) jobs to do like filling the dishwasher, clearing the kitchen, general tidying and the ever present haunt of cleaning, but I try my hardest to put all of those off to enjoy the precious time (sometimes just a couple of minutes here or there) of simple play, make believe and laughter. Yesterday I was the gruffalo followed by being the wolf and grandma in a frantic sketch compilation. With my three year old and one year old laughing hysterically dressed up as little red riding hood and being an owl, if I could bottle a sound it would be their giggles! Those were but a few minutes, yet they gave us such happiness and fun.
I listen to quite a few podcasts, including Serial and S-Town recently. In S-Town the main "character" , John B Mclemore takes a very analytical approach to calculate how much time we as adults have to enjoy people, things, hobbies and activities we're passionate about i.e. Excluding sleep, commutes and work. He calculates it as the amount of life to do as you wish.
This year I experienced a personal event, which caused a seismic shift mentally and emotionally. I have taken time to stop to reflect and think about my world and all those I hold dear, and the thing that races to the front of mind is always time, wanting more time to spend with people, doing things, hearing stories, making memories, and also time for self care to take time to just be.
This phrase Making Minutes Matter doesn't have to be deep, it can simply mean taking a few minutes for self, getting some fresh air and going for a walk without headphones without a phone and just enjoying being and the surroundings. It can mean whatever people want it to mean, but when I think about those 525,600 minutes in a year I know that small time snippets here and there, day by day, add up to something that really matters, it's a whole lot more than "just a few minutes".