There – I’ve found the right title for this article as it not only advertises what I’m writing about this month, but also uses an expression from basketball – a game which is currently all the rage in Spain. Especially since we took ‘Silver’ in the ‘Eurobasket’.
Two birds with one stone.
Because my intention today is to write about how we spend our time.
Of course, dozens of studies have been published on this subject over the years from various points of view. The most common axiom is that we spend a third of our lives asleep, or maybe it was half – I must have dropped off when I started reading the report on the subject.
Children sleep more that teenagers, who in turn sleep more than the oldies.
Which could suggest that the oldies have more time to spend doing things. A fuller day. But no, quite the opposite.
I can remember those summer afternoons of my youth, spent in a small town in Valencia together with my family. Interminable stretches of empty time which would begin at the close of a long siesta, as overseen by our mother. Boiling hot afternoons, with the sun dripping molten lead onto the deserted streets and the church bells tolling the hour. Three. Four. Five… as my brothers and sisters and I would be flopped on the old mattresses my mother had put out on the terrace in search of the tiniest breeze, reading old comic-books and furtively chewing gum.
Long afternoons… as we waited for the heat to diminish a bit so we could at last be released to go out and play with our friends. I had more than enough time for anything.
Well – anything except the summer homework. Each year I would put the essays and books on the back burner until the day before school began and I would have to start the new term promising myself that next year I would prepare myself properly.
In those times, in one day you could play several games of football, go fishing in the river, read some, paint a while, go out for a walk and hunt girls so as to pull their pony tails and play Cowboys and Indians with a set of plastic figures.
In those wonderful years, television had barely been introduced. There were a few hours of blurry black and white shows starting around 7.00pm which were quite unwatchable and, of course, we preferred to be outside playing. Now look – the whole country watches the telly.
TV watching, like many other futile affairs, is another slice of time wasted, ‘Time In’ as it were.
Life is about eating a great paella (while, of course, washing the plates afterwards is time wasted). Drinking a bottle of fine wine is life (not wandering around afterwards looking for a stupid bottle-bank).
The hours we pass in queues, waiting for a bus, waiting for the dentist, or trying to pay some local tax in the town hall or in government offices. All time wasted.
I could mention a hundred other things we put up with in life which are a complete waste of our precious time, but by listing them, one would be obliged to conclude that adults live but for a short while, between those various wasted hours which assail us. The family television being the main culprit.
I waste almost an hour every day walking the blasted dog, a sort of sausage-hound which has adopted my family as its own and, despite my best intentions, has become something of a friend.
I spend a further two hours a day looking for my glasses, my house-keys, the telephone number I wrote on the back of some piece of paper, or even the note which was to remind me what I intended to write about today.
More time is wasted with the daily search for where I left my car or by returning home to make sure that I had remembered to switch off the gas, feed the hamster or kiss my wife goodbye.
A long list of time, precious time, stupidly wasted as we reflect on how short our stay on this earth really is.
Life is but a few days. Nothing is so true if we but cast back through our lives in search of those times where we really felt alive.
Which reminds me. Is it really worth wasting our spittle and our precious time talking about politics?
