FSB Author Article
Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book Things I
Overheard
While Talking to Myself
by Alan Alda
Published by Random House;
September 2007;$24.95US; 978-1-4000-6617-9
Copyright © 2007 Alan Alda
Three Minutes
It takes exactly three minutes of my
life and it happens most mornings. I scoop into a bowl some cold
oatmeal that I’ve cooked in a huge pot at the beginning of the
week and zap it in the microwave for three minutes. I know some people
think oatmeal is boring, and I understand that my even mentioning the
word will lock me in your mind as someone who is as boring as porridge
itself, but this kind of thing interests me.
I’m condemned by some inner compulsion to think about the daily
rituals of my life. I have a low grade fever for improving myself in
many ways, including everyday tasks. This extends even to making
oatmeal. I love oatmeal. To me it’s not boring. I agree that
ordinary oatmeal is very
boring, but not the steel-cut Irish kind -- the kind that pops in your
mouth when you bite into it in little glorious bursts like a sort of
gummy champagne. Unfortunately, it’s the kind that takes forty
minutes to cook. But I love it so much that for months I was cooking it
every morning while I read the paper. Then, following my insane habit
of questioning everything I do to see if I can do it better, I had a
eureka moment. What if I made a vat of the stuff every week? Would it
still pop in my mouth if I stuck a bowlful of it in the microwave every
morning? It did. And three minutes seemed like the perfect time to heat
it.
So, there I was, setting the timer on the microwave every morning, and
three minutes of my life would go by while molecules of moisture jumped
around inside the oatmeal. Then, one morning, when the bell dinged and
I opened the door to the oven, I was hit with a new wave of my
unfortunate disease of self-improvement. It came in the form of a
question: Where did those three
minutes just go?
There was something about knowing the timer was ticking off exactly 180
seconds every morning that suddenly jolted me. I waste plenty of time
during the day. I play hundreds of games of chess against my computer
and only beat it when it makes stupid mistakes, which is a complete
waste of time. But the oatmeal part of my day is the only slice of time
that gets counted to the second. And it’s unnerving. Where does
it go? I was unexpectedly asking myself the great existential question
that occurs to most of us at some point, and to which there’s no
answer: If time is all we really
have in life, how should we spend it?
Like all existential questions this is an annoying one. It seems to
have pre-eminent importance because it is truly a question of life and
death, but what are you supposed to do about it? Are you supposed to
watch yourself every second? Putting on my shoes and socks, am I
supposed to think: Wait, if I put on
each shoe and tie the lace right after I put on each sock, I can save
two seconds each morning that, in a lifetime, could add up to days. I
could re-read War and Peace in that time. I’d become a better
person, just by changing the order of getting into my footwear.
That would be insane. By the way, I’ve timed it and it actually
saves ten seconds. I could probably accumulate enough time before I die
to squeeze in War and Peace and two self help books, but I’m not
going to put my shoes on this way because I feel it would identify me
as unnecessarily crazy.
So, here’s what I’ve decided to do. I’m going to
think of those three minutes as play: a small vacation. A vacation is
wasted time that doesn’t seem wasted because it has a name. So,
I’ll name those three minutes Solitude. They will be my retreat,
my morning Caribbean. I will float off into nothingness so that
existence, when I return, will be even tastier.
Existence will pop to life like bubbles in a gummy champagne.
Copyright © 2007
Alan Alda